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E. Bostwick 



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Class 

Book- 



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Copyright N°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



EARMARKS OF LITERATURE 



Earmarks of Literature 

The Things That Make 
Good Books Good 



BY 

ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK, Ph.D. 

Librarian, St. Louis Public Library 




CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG & CO. 

1914 






Copyright 

A. C. McClurg & Co. 

1914 



Published January, 1914 



W, t. HAH. PAINTING 68MPANV, 6HIPA60 

JAN 26 1914 

(&CI.AS61' 



FOREWORD 

This is an attempt to gather and group to- 
gether many things that are discussed more 
thoroughly and at greater length in other 
places, but nowhere, the writer believes, all 
in one place, or in a style that will commend 
them to the general reader. 

The book is based on a series of lectures 
given first to the training class of the Brook- 
lyn Public Library, afterward to that of the 
New York Public Library, and finally to that 
of the St. Louis Public Library. The series 
has grown from year to year by the inclu- 
sion of material that seemed necessary to 
supplement and round out the knowledge 
commonly obtained in the schools. 

Arthur E. Bostwick. 

St. Louis Public Library. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 


PAGE 


I 


The Nature of Literature . . . 


i 


II 


Style — Its Grammatical Form . 


10 


III 


Clearness of Style 


21 


IV 


Appropriateness of Style . . . 


32 


V 


Character in Style 


40 


VI 


Special Literary Forms .... 


47 


VII 


On the Reading of Poetry Aloud 


61 


VIII 


Our Two Languages 


70 


IX 


The Structure of Literature . , 


76 


X 


Literature as a Form of Art . . 


87 


XI 


" The Appreciation of Literature . 


93 


XII 


The Preservation of Literature . 


99 


XIII 


The Ownership of Literature . 


107 


XIV 


The Makers of Literature . , . 


■ iH 


XV 


Some Formalities of Written Speech 


120 


XVI 


The Context in Literature . . . 


. 128 


XVII 


The Sampling of Literature . . 


• 134 


XVIII 


The Sum of the Matter .... 


139 




Index 


143 



I 



Earmarks of Literature 

CHAPTER I 

The Nature of Literature 

S THERE anything about real literature 
that marks it for what it is? May we 
learn to recognize the blooded literary stock 
from the " mavericks" — the waifs and strays 
of literature? The untrained reader may 
sometimes err; that is because he does not 
know where to seek for the marks of identifi- 
cation. The earmarks of literature may not 
be evident to a careless passer-by, but they 
exist, and it may be worth while to try to 
define and describe some of them. And at 
the outset it should be noted that the word 
"literature" itself has been used in various 
senses. In its broadest use the term includes 
all that has been put into written words since 
the earliest dawn of time. Even the rude 
l 



2 Earmarks of Literature 

scribblings of Roman loungers on columns 
and doorways, preserved to us by the storm of 
ashes that overwhelmed Pompeii, are part of 
it, and we can not deny the claim of the rudest 
picture-writing of the earliest savage to be 
placed in the same category. The multiplica- 
tion table is literature in this sense, and the 
class includes every book in the largest library. 
It is in this sense that we speak of the 
"literature" of arithmetic or of agriculture, 
meaning all that has been written on those 
subjects. 

In its narrowest sense the class includes 
only such writings as have permanent value 
due to their form and the treatment of their 
subject-matter, independently of their sub- 
stance itself. They may have and should have 
value for the latter reason also, but their 
value should not rest entirely on this. To 
illustrate: we are not accustomed to rank 
works on fishing as literature; yet Izaak 
Walton's Complete Angler stands in the very 
first rank among purely literary compositions 
simply on account of the manner in which it 



The Nature of Literature 3 

is written. Manner can make anything good 
literature, no matter what it is about. 

Between these two classes — literature in 
its widest and literature in its narrowest sense 
— the word has been used and can be used to 
mean almost any desired class or combination 
of written works. Is it any wonder that there 
is continued dispute about whether this or 
that work is " literature?" For instance, 
many authorities would exclude from the class 
all works not marked by nobility of thought, 
and all that are on special as opposed to gen- 
eral subjects. This would make substance 
have a good deal to do with the definition. 
The class as defined in the Dewey Decimal 
Classification, used in many libraries, is 
mixed. It is determined partly by form, 
because poetry, drama, essays, etc., are made 
sub-classes, and partly by the character of the 
subject-matter, because humor, fiction, etc., 
are made other sub-classes. In other words, 
in this classification, poetry, no matter what its 
subject may be, is classed as literature because 
of its peculiar form. Humor, no matter in 



4 Earmarks of Literature 

what form it may be, is classed there because 
its subject matter is " funny." Of course this 
is scarcely logical, but a strictly logical system 
of library classification is impossible. When 
a writer on the subject speaks of " literature " 
he may include very much more, or very 
much less, than is contained in the library 
class of that name. 

We shall consider here literature in its 
narrowest meaning, which is at the same time 
its highest; namely, those writings that have 
permanent value due to their form independ- 
ently of their substance. 

We have already seen, in our glance at the 
decimal classification, that certain formal ar- 
rangements of words or sentences entitle the 
works in which they are used to be regarded 
as literature from the standpoint of library 
classification. This, of course, is not the only 
case in which classification must take pretense 
into account instead of facts. When Dr. 
Cook's narrative of North Pole discovery was 
first discredited, there was an amusing news- 
paper controversy over its proper library 



The Nature of Literature 5 

classification. Reporters waited upon public 
librarians, in various parts of the country, to 
inquire whether the book was to be cata- 
logued as travel or fiction. Evidently if the 
classification is to depend on the result of an 
investigation of the credibility of a work, the 
classifier might have to wait long to complete 
it, and in controverted instances different 
librarians would classify differently, causing 
much confusion. Here the author's intention 
must govern us. No one would call Baron 
Munchausen's book history, because the 
author himself did not intend us to believe it. 
David Copperfield is not autobiography, for 
the same reason. But General Butler's Own 
Story would be so classed, even by one who 
considered it largely fiction. 

The same thing is true of classification 
from the standpoint of literary form. Thus, 
if a work is written in meter, it is poetry from 
a library standpoint and must be classified as 
such. We do not inquire whether it is good 
or bad poetry. But in the highest sense of the 
word, as we have just defined it, only good 



6 Earmarks of Literature 

poetry is literature, and, indeed, only good 
poetry is poetry at all in the best sense. 
Schoolboy doggerel may be verse, and a good 
deal that is little better finds its way into our 
libraries. It must then be classified as " liter- 
ature" under " poetry," but it is neither 
poetry nor literature in the best sense. When 
a work is dismissed, then, with the remark, 
" It is all very well, but it is not literature," 
the speaker means simply that it will never 
have permanent value from its form alone. 
This may or may not be a condemnation, ac- 
cording as the work does or does not aspire 
to have such value. To say that Robinson's 
High School Algebra or Roscoe and Schor- 
lemmer's Chemistry is " not literature" is in 
no wise derogatory, because these aim to be 
of value only through their subject-matter. 
Such books must, it is true, conform to cer- 
tain rules of form. They must be plainly 
and grammatically written and the subject- 
matter must be logically expressed. But their 
permanent value is due not to this form but 
to the information that they contain. In a 



The Nature of Literature 7 

book of this kind the form is generally only 
the handmaiden of the subject, while in a 
purely literary work the subject is generally 
but the foundation on which the literary 
qualities of the work are built up. To say 
that Martin's Physiology is not literature is 
not therefore to condemn it, but to say the 
same thing of a piece of verse is to say of it 
the very worst thing that could be thought of, 
because here the form is everything. If it is 
literature it is so by virtue of its poetic form 
and style, and to say that it is not literature 
is to condemn these as hopelessly bad. 

It may be well to repeat here that very few 
works of pure literature have not also valu- 
able subject-matter, and that very many tech- 
nical books can claim to be also works of liter- 
ature by reason of their perfect form. That 
is the case with Walton's book on angling, 
mentioned at the outset of this chapter. It 
may be the case even with so dry a work 
as a mathematical treatise. This is notably so 
in the French language, where beauty of form 
is prized more highly than it is in English. 



8 Earmarks of Literature 

From this point of view the Romance lan- 
guages — that is, those derived from the 
Latin, like French, Italian, and Spanish — are 
more literary than Teutonic tongues like 
English and German. Not that their highest 
points overtop us, for Shakespeare is higher 
than Moliere and Goethe than Cervantes, but 
that on the whole the general level of writing 
rises more nearly to a good literary plane. 
From the standpoint of literary style alone, a 
trashy French novel is apt to be better than 
a far more serious work in English, and the 
general run of German fiction is still further 
down than our own. 

It may happen, curiously enough, that a 
work written as a serious contribution to 
knowledge survives only through its excellent 
literary form, its facts being out of date, or 
that a work intended as a literary masterpiece 
is of value now only because it contains curi- 
ous facts, like Erasmus Darwin's poem The 
Botanick Garden. 

In order to be good literature, therefore, a 
work must possess good form. The work of 



The Nature of Literature 9 

literature is the polished gentleman among 
other works. A man may have sterling worth, 
but he cannot hope to move among cultivated 
people if he eats with his knife or sits with 
his boots on the table. 

Now there are kinds of form which all 
literary works must possess, and there are in 
addition rules to which each work must con- 
form when it is written according to some 
special formula, as in poetry, the drama, or 
the essay. General literary form is called 
style, and we shall take up this before con- 
sidering the rules of the various kinds of 
special literary form. Style is nothing more 
nor less than the manner in which an author 
expresses himself. To pass muster it must 
be: (i) Grammatical; (2) clear; (3) appro- 
priate to its subject; (4) characteristic of the 
writer. 

We shall consider these qualities in turn in 
the chapters that follow. 



N 



CHAPTER II 

Style — Its Grammatical Form 

O WORK is entitled to rank as good 
literature that is not written grammatic- 
ally. By this I mean that it must conform in 
all respects with the mode of writing gen- 
erally accepted among educated persons as 
correct. It must be properly expressed, and 
properly capitalized and punctuated. 

What determines whether it is so or not? 
Here we find that authorities differ, being 
divided, in the main, into two schools: those 
who believe that the rules as laid down in 
text books and treatises rest on certain scien- 
tific principles of language and that these 
rules and principles may always be applied 
to test correctness; and those, on the other 
hand, who believe that the sole test of correct- 
ness is good usage, and that no matter how 
contrary to fixed grammatical rules an ex- 
pression may be, it becomes correct as soon 
10 



Style — Its Grammatical Form 11 

as it is in general use among cultivated per- 
sons. According to the first view, what is 
good English today will be good English 
twenty years hence; according to the other 
view, an expression that is positively incorrect 
today may be good English in 1920. 

As is usual in such cases the truth doubtless 
lies between these extremes. In the first place, 
the rules in the books are deduced from the 
language itself, not the language from the 
rules. If I wish to write a grammar of some 
savage tongue that has never been reduced to 
writing, I cannot do it from my own inner 
consciousness ; I must go and observe how the 
language is used by those who speak it. 
Doubtless I shall find that, in general, it con- 
forms to rules and laws; all natural phe- 
nomena do that; but if I write them down I 
must follow what I find ; if my written rules 
do not agree with the language, so much the 
worse for the rules — not so much the worse 
for the language. The fact is that man is part 
of nature, not apart from it, and that his lan- 
guages are a part of natural phenomena. 



12 Earmarks of Literature 

Their laws are therefore on a par with other 
natural laws. Astronomers once deduced 
from their observations the rule that all the 
planets moved in circles. Years afterward 
closer observation showed that the curves were 
not circles after all. The astronomers did not 
shut their eyes to the new facts and hold to 
the old rules; they made new rules to fit the 
facts. This is what natural philosophers are 
continually doing and grammarians will have 
to do the same. 

Again, students of nature now recognize 
the fact of growth and development every- 
where. Language is not exempt from this. 
If a language is alive it will grow and there- 
fore change. We may not want it to grow; 
but it will, for all that; just as trees will grow 
even when we much prefer that they should 
remain as they are. Growth, however, does 
not mean exemption from law. On the con- 
trary, it always takes place along certain lines, 
although we may not always be able to tell 
beforehand what those lines may be. The 
usage of words and their changes are like- 



Style — Its Grammatical Form 13 

wise not erratic, although they may seem to 
be so. One of the great sources from which 
our stock of words is replenished is slang. 
Slang has been called " language in the 
making." Now slang does not arise hap- 
hazard. Slang words become popular usually 
because of their extreme aptness ; that is, they 
have some special connection with the lan- 
guage in the light of existing conditions that 
makes them more expressive than any legiti- 
mate word. Often they last but a short time 
and are forgotten ; sometimes they continue in 
use, are taken first into colloquial speech and 
then into more careful diction, and finally 
become regular literary forms. The same is 
true of new grammatical forms, which start- 
ing in slang phrases may at last end as recog- 
nized idioms. Now it is quite possible to look 
ahead and at least to surmise whether an 
expression, not now good English, may ever 
become so. For instance, I do not believe that 
the slang expression "to douse the glim," 
meaning to put out the light, will ever be 
literary English. My reason is that it has 



14 Earmarks of Literature 

been recognized as slang for a hundred years 
or more; that it is not in very common use 
and that if there had been need for it in 
literary English it would have reached its goal 
long ago. This is not by any means certain, 
however. The word "kid," meaning a child, 
was originally slang used by thieves and ex- 
actly on a par with " douse the glim." It has 
recently come into wide use in colloquial 
speech, and it is within the bounds of pos- 
sibility that it may one day be literary 
English. In the compound "kidnap" it is so 
already. 

To take an expression that is not slang but 
simply incorrect, I do not believe that literary 
English will ever sanction the double nega- 
tive. We shall probably never be allowed to 
say "he didn't go no farther." It is usual to 
teach children that this is wrong because it is 
not logical. "If he didn't go no farther, he 
must have gone somewhat farther." But the 
double negative is used in Greek, and the 
negatives there are regarded as strengthening 
each other, not as destroying each other. And 



Style — Its Grammatical Form 15 

the double negative is used in English by 
quite as many people as do not use it. The 
trouble with it is that it has always been used 
by people of imperfect education and has 
always been regarded as a special mark of 
lack of education. Hence it is quite improb- 
able that it will ever be thought fit for good 
company. 

Again, some expressions have been for some 
time on the borders of good literary society 
but have never succeeded in gaining admit- 
tance. Such a form is "you was," for the 
second person singular of the past tense of the 
verb " to be." This is still occasionally used 
by educated persons. In Fielding's Tom 
Jones all the characters use it. Jane Austen, 
in her novels, frequently makes her characters 
employ it, but never when she represents them 
as persons of great cultivation. Those who 
still use it call our attention to the fact that 
originally and properly "thou" and not 
"you" is the singular pronoun of the second 
person. "You" is plural, and was used for 
the singular originally as a polite form. It 



\ 



16 Earmarks of Literature 

has now taken the place of "thou" every- 
where except in solemn and provincial dic- 
tion. Now when the pronoun "you" is used 
as a singular, why should it not take the singu- 
lar verb? This is logical enough, but the 
same logic would permit us to say "you is" 
which never pretended to be correct. This 
is only one more of the instances that show 
plainly how little logic has to do with the 
matter. "You were" is the correct form 
simply because it is used by the great ma- 
jority of educated persons. 

Good English, then, is determined by good 
usage, and good usage follows definite lines 
both in what it is and in the changes that 
occur in it, although we may not always see 
that any lines at all are being followed. One 
thing is certain : a man will never write good 
English simply by following rules. That 
results in what has been called "school 
teacher's English," which can be told by an 
expert as soon as he hears it, and which is apt 
to lead to the conclusion that the user has 
been accustomed to speak very incorrectly 



Style — Its Grammatical Form 17 

and is trying to mend his fault by observing 
certain set rules. 

The rigid following of rules would tend to 
destroy all the characteristics of a language. 
The forms in which a language seems to break 
rules and to cut out new paths for itself are 
called idioms, and no one can write a lan- 
guage well who does not write it idiomatic- 
ally. Idioms, though they seem to be depar- 
tures from rules, are usually only the result 
of growth in an unusual direction. Some- 
times their origin has been forgotten, and then 
those who would adhere too closely to rule 
pounce upon them and brand them as incor- 
rect. I have heard of a school teacher who 
insisted that "methinks" was incorrect and 
that it was simply an illiterate form of " I 
think." He did not know, evidently, that the 
last syllable of the word is not our present 
word " think" but an obsolete similar form 
meaning to seem, and that "me" is the indi- 
rect object. " Methinks" is simply " it seems 
to me." But suppose that there was no record 
of this old form, and that we could not explain 



18 Earmarks of Literature 

"methinks" any more than we can explain 
many other idiomatic forms. Its use in good 
literature would still sustain it and we should 
be sure that it arose in some logical way. 

This is the attitude to take in all disputed 
questions of good or bad English. I do not 
mean to say that it is always possible to decide 
at once. The best authorities may differ and 
do differ. It may be necessary to take all 
sorts of circumstances into account. Only, a 
critic should never point triumphantly to a 
rule without giving any other reason. When 
Archbishop Trench stoutly maintained that 
"It is me" is perfectly good English, he 
brought down on himself a storm of protest. 
Most of it was based simply on the fact that 
the form violates the rule of grammar that 
requires a predicate pronoun to agree with 
the subject. Yet the French say c'est mot, 
which is the same thing, and there is no dis- 
pute about it in their language. The only 
reason for a dispute in English is that usage 
is divided. The best writers and speakers 
nowadays do not say "it is me," and if that 



Style — Its Grammatical Form 19 

form was ever idiomatic English it has 
dropped, or is dropping, from good literary 
use. Doubtless the reason it has so dropped 
is that it appears to be against rule, and rules 
do thus have a powerful effect in forcing a 
language to conform to them unless an idiom 
is very strongly established. It is well that 
this is so, for no one wants a language con- 
sisting entirely of idioms. 

What I have said applies also to pronuncia- 
tion, although I shall not touch on that here, 
as it is a part of spoken, not of written lan- 
guage. It applies also to capitalization and 
punctuation. Of these I will say only that the 
tendency of the language is to use as few 
capitals and marks of punctuation as usage 
will permit. We go further in both directions 
in this country than they do in England. 

The question of good English is very much 
more difficult than the corresponding one in 
many other languages. In France, for in- 
stance, there is a body — the Academy — 
whose word on literary matters is law. There 
is no question, therefore, on matters of good 



20 Earmarks of Literature 

French, when the academicians have made 
a decree. Some have lamented because there 
is no such body to settle English usage, but 
it is probably better that there is none. Eng- 
lish thus remains a very vital tongue, sending 
out feelers in all directions like a vigorous 
vine, making some mistakes but keeping to 
the same general trend. It has always been 
so and its freedom has made it, as we whose 
mother tongue it is like to think and proclaim, 
the most flexible and best vehicle of expres- 
sion on the globe — perhaps the destined 
world-language to which some enthusiasts 
look forward. The question of good English 
is treated sanely in the appendix on Faulty 
Diction in the Standard Dictionary, and cur- 
rently in the Bookman Letter-box and in some 
of the daily papers, notably the New York 
Sun. Among good books on the subject are 
White's Words and Their Uses, Trench's 
Study of Words, and the works of Prof. 
Lounsbury of Yale. An amusing controversy 
on the subject is contained in Dean Alvord's 
The Queen's English, followed by Moon's 
The Dean's English. 



N 



CHAPTER III 

Clearness of Style 

O STYLE is good that is not clear. In 
fact, ^no book is a work of good litera- 
ture when the ordinary reader cannot under- 
stand the author's meaning readily, whether 
his difficulty arises from the subject or from 
the way in which it is treated. If the subject 
is a complex or confusing one, which requires 
close study, the book is a technical treatise or a 
text book, and is therefore, as we have seen, 
without the borders of pure literature. If, 
on the other hand, there is no particular diffi- 
culty with the ideas that the writer wishes to 
impart, but his meaning is obscure owing to 
the way in which he tries to express them, 
then his want of clearness mars the literary 
quality which his work would otherwise 
possess. 

These two kinds of obscurity are frequently 
confused by readers. Both prevent a work 
21 



22 Earmarks of Literature 

from being classed with literature in the 
purest sense; but the first kind — that due to 
deep thought — may of course exist in a work 
of the very highest plane — for instance, a 
philosophical treatise. The difficulty here is 
that the writer is trying to impart unfamiliar 
ideas which cannot be grasped without mental 
effort. But the fact that you find it hard to 
grasp an author's ideas may be due to his own 
inability to realize exactly what they are, or 
at any rate, to express them clearly. More 
than one writer or speaker has received credit 
for profound thought, when he should have 
been censured for lack of clearness and con- 
ciseness. 

It should be remembered that this question 
is, in the main, entirely apart from that of 
grammar. An ungrammatical sentence may 
be perfectly clear and a grammatical one very 
obscure. If a boy says, " I hain't got no 
money," we are in no doubt whatever of his 
meaning. If, on the other hand, we are in- 
formed that "John asked James to tell his 
aunt to mend his coat," the use of the pronouns 



Clearness of Style 23 

makes the meaning quite confused, although 
the fault in the sentence is rhetorical, not 
grammatical. This illustrates how a sentence 
containing only half a dozen words or so may 
be quite confused. On the other hand a sen- 
tence two pages in length may be quite clear, 
although the construction of such a sentence 
requires care and is a piece of work that not 
every one can do. William M. Evarts was 
noted for his long sentences, and yet so nicely 
balanced were they that no one could fail to 
understand them. 

Occasionally the necessity for clearness con- 
flicts very sharply with grammatical rules. 
For instance, grammarians have always ob- 
jected to "splitting the infinitive," that is, to 
the insertion of modifying words between 
" to," used as the infinitive sign, and the verb 
itself. Thus they tell us we must not say " to 
greatly err," but " greatly to err" or "to err 
greatly." There is no particular logical rea- 
son for this rule, for the word "to," here, was 
originally only the preposition and not a com- 
ponent part of the verb — no more so, at any 



24 Earmarks of Literature 

rate, than the auxiliaries in such forms as 
" can be " or " may be." No one objects to our 
saying "it may not be" or "it may possibly 
be." There can be no doubt, however, that a 
"split" infinitive is regarded as inadmissible 
by most good authorities on English. There 
can be as little doubt, probably, that almost 
all good writers have used it, either habitu- 
ally or occasionally. The reason is that clear- 
ness often requires it. English has lost almost 
all its inflections and is obliged to make the 
relations of its words clear by their position in 
the sentence. "John hit James" and "James 
hit John " mean very different things ; but in 
Latin the shifting of names would not change 
the meaning. The name of the boy who did 
the hitting would be in the nominative case, 
and that of the one who was hit would be 
in the accusative, no matter what position 
they might occupy. The only thing effected 
by shifting the names about would be a slight 
alteration in the emphasis. With pronouns, 
when we still have distinct forms for the cases, 
the same is true in English. "I saw him" 



Clearness of Style 25 

and "Him saw I" mean precisely the same 
thing, although the latter order of words 
would be used only in poetry. 

Now the clearest place in the world for an 
adverbial modifier is within the verb-phrase 
itself, when this phrase consists of more than 
one word. Here it cannot possibly be mis- 
understood. And writers who are accustomed 
to place it so in verbal forms with auxiliaries 
are very apt to claim the same privilege with 
the infinitive. The more outrageous the 
" split" is, the truer this is, and it is truer in 
spoken than in written language. Take the 
following: "I wish emphatically and with 
as much deliberation as possible to say." 
Here the speaker "wishes to say." Does 
the long modifier tell how he wishes or how 
he is to say? The meaning is somewhat 
ambiguous even in the written form, but the 
reader will glance ahead and may make up 
his mind that the modifier belongs to the in- 
finitive. But when the sentence is spoken the 
hearer does not know what is coming until 
after the word "possible." In his mind the 



26 Earmarks of Literature 

modifier may belong to "wish" or it may go 
with something that is yet to come. The doubt 
confuses him. The speaker is very apt, there- 
fore, to put his infinitive sign before the 
modifier and say "I wish to — emphatically 
and with as much deliberation as possible — 
say that," etc., etc. When chided for so ab- 
surd a "split," he would be very likely to 
plead : " Oh yes ; I know it is incorrect, but 
I could make my meaning plainer that way." 

In a colloquial or impromptu address, or 
in a similar form of writing, as in a news- 
paper article, this reason holds good, whereas 
in a more formal composition, where the 
writer has time to rearrange his sentences and 
secure clearness, if possible, by some other 
method, it ought not to be accepted. Much 
more might be said on this conflict of clearness 
and good usage, and such things are doubtless 
playing their part in the slow alteration of 
the language. 

Obscurity, however, may exist or be avoided 
in ways that have nothing to do with either 
grammatical or rhetorical rules. A writer, 



Clearness of Style 27 

for instance, may use obsolete or provincial 
forms of expression, or foreign words, in 
doing either of which he lays himself open 
to the charge of using bad English as well 
as obscure diction. A foreign word, of course, 
may or may not be clear, according to the 
degree of knowledge of the person to whom 
it is addressed. It used to be presumed that 
every well-educated person knew Latin, and 
it was therefore admissible to use Latin words 
and quotations quite freely in any work ad- 
dressed to people of education. But in our 
time education does not follow fixed lines, and 
it is quite possible that one may be well- 
educated without a knowledge of the classical 
tongues. Much Latin, or even any Latin at 
all, therefore, may sin against clearness. The 
same may be said of French, German, and 
other languages. In an essay intended to be 
used by those who are presumably familiar 
with those languages, words and expressions 
may be freely used that in another class of 
writing would be hopelessly obscure. The 
same is true of all sorts of allusions, technical 



28 Earmarks of Literature 

or otherwise. Clerk Maxwell, the great 
English physicist, wrote numerous poems 
embodying in every line reference to the 
quantities and processes of higher mathe- 
matics. To a mathematician these were 
thoroughly clear, and indeed approached 
closely to literature, while to the ordinary 
reader they conveyed no more meaning than 
if they had been written in the Choctaw 
language. The classical allusions with 
which Milton's works are often loaded, were 
doubtless familiar to those to whom they were 
especially addressed, but nowadays even the 
student needs a note now and then to help 
him. If a twentieth century poet should 
follow Milton's example in this regard, he 
would be pronounced pedantic. 

The writing, in other words, should be 
adapted to its public. And if it is so adapted 
we do not quarrel with it because it is not 
adapted to some other public. We do not 
insist that Milton is obscure because the ordi- 
nary reader has to look up some of his allu- 
sions, any more than we should hold that 



Clearness of Style 29 

Moliere is unintelligible because we do not 
happen to understand French. 

Comparatively few persons can read Henry- 
James with pleasure. This is partly because 
of late years he has cultivated certain pecu- 
liarities of style that are vexing, and in so 
far he is to be condemned. But it is also 
largely because he makes his points indirectly 
and imparts his ideas by saying what appears 
to refer to something different. He thus 
appeals directly to those persons who have 
cultivated quickness of mind — mental alert- 
ness — in his particular line, and therefore he 
is not to be condemned because his meaning 
is not at once apparent to everyone. It is 
even conceivable that a man might invent a 
form of expression which should be intelli- 
gible to himself alone, and write in it a 
beautiful work of pure literature which 
should yet be uncomprehended by the rest 
of mankind. 

Yet, other things being equal, a work of 
literature is more catholic as it appeals to a 
greater number of people; hence a writer 



30 Earmarks of Literature 

who limits his audience in any way, so far 
falls in the literary scale. Of course every 
writer must be limited to those who speak the 
tongue, unless his work is translated, yet I 
cannot help thinking that those who can be 
successfully translated and so appeal to a 
wider circle must have more of that quality 
of universal sympathy which characterizes the 
greatest literature. It is this which is the 
very acme of clearness — which enables the 
writer to reach his reader's heart almost before 
his sentence comes to an end. 

But there is such a thing as being too clear, 
or rather, I should say, as trying too hard 
to be clear. Take the simple case where one's 
pronouns are mixed. Some writers are so 
afraid that they will be laughed at for con- 
fusing their pronouns that they seem to have 
eschewed these parts of speech altogether, and 
say "John asked James to tell John's aunt 
to mend John's coat," or, still worse, they 
explain themselves in parentheses, as, "John 
asked James to tell his (John's) aunt to mend 
his (John's) coat." This procedure may be 



Clearness of Style 31 

necessary in certain cases, but it is hardly a 
characteristic of literary style. Similarly, 
when a writer appears to be trying very hard 
to avoid obscurity in any way, as when he 
introduces long footnotes to explain his allu- 
sions, or translates his Latin or German quota- 
tions in parentheses, he at once suggests the 
very thing that he tries to avoid. No one can 
attain lucidity in this way. 

The clearest style is generally the simplest. 
The writer whose meaning is so plain that it 
never gives us a thought, and whose diction 
is so simple and ordinary that it seems easy, 
until we try to imitate it, is, so far as this 
quality of style is concerned, the one who 
makes the most successful contribution to 
literature. 



CHAPTER IV 

Appropriateness of Style 

ALL tools must be adapted to the work 
that they are to perform. A screw- 
driver is an excellent device for its purpose, 
but one cannot cut meat with it. And lan- 
guage, after all, is a tool to convey our ideas 
— to get them into other people's heads. Its 
shape and character, therefore, must depend 
on the kind of ideas that it is necessary to 
convey and the kind of people to whom we 
desire to convey them. We saw in the last 
lecture that a series of words might be clear 
to one person and not to another. But it is 
more than a question of clearness. All knives 
will cut, but we choose a carving knife for 
one kind of cutting and a penknife for another. 
So a sermon and a comic anecdote may both 
be perfectly clear to the reader, but if either 
were told in the style of the other we should 
recognize the inappropriateness of it at once. 

32 



Appropriateness of Style 33 

It must be said that a good deal of the 
appropriateness or inappropriateness of lan- 
guage to its subject rests on considerations 
that have nothing to do with language itself. 
It is largely a matter of association and 
fashion, and it is here, therefore, that for- 
eigners stumble very frequently. You look 
in your French dictionary and find several 
words corresponding to an English word; but 
the dictionary does not and cannot tell you 
the fine shades of usage. On the other hand, 
the Frenchman, knowing that an animal may 
be called either a " beast" or a " creature," 
and knowing that the latter word is applicable 
also to a human being, assumes that the former 
also may be so used, and calls a woman " that 
dear beast," much to our amusement. If we 
analyze the matter, it is purely an affair of 
custom that one word is not used in both 
senses, just as the other is. Why do we call 
the sun " he " and the moon " she " ? In some 
other languages the reverse is the case, and 
there are thousands of such instances. For 
solemn discourse we have in English almost 



34 Earmarks of Literature 

a separate dialect. Some recent English 
writers on literary criticism lay special stress 
on this as one of the strong points of the 
language. No one could possibly think that 
a prayer in English was addressed to anyone 
but the Deity, even though the name of God 
does not appear in it. In French the same 
diction is used that is employed in speaking 
to an intimate friend, a child, or a servant. 
The finer shades of appropriateness of style 
are often unnoticed and neglected, especially 
in letter-writing. People write letters of con- 
dolence in the same style that they would use 
to tell of a trip to New York; they address 
aged persons who are barely known to them 
in the same style that they would use to a 
friend of equal age; they are flippant when 
they ought to be serious ; or ponderous when 
they ought to be graceful. The art of letter 
writing is very largely the art of adapting 
one's manner to the particular person ad- 
dressed and to the particular occasion and 
object of the letter. It is the same with 
books, many of which fall below the best 



Appropriateness of Style 35 

standards of literature in just this way. They 
are grammatical, well-expressed, clear, but 
not adapted to their readers, their occasions 
or their objects. As examples of books badly 
adapted to readers, take many children's 
books, especially those written in former 
times for religious instruction. The lan- 
guage, the forms of thought, the method of 
the writer, are all such as to repel the child 
instead of to attract him. On the other hand, 
there are books that are "too easy" — written 
down to the child's supposed intellect in a 
way to excite his contempt. A candidate for 
governor of a state once lost many votes by 
addressing an audience of working-men in his 
shirt sleeves. He thought they would be 
pleased at this show of democracy, but they 
were offended because he did not show the 
same respect to them that he would have 
shown to a more fashionable or scholarly 
audience. This is the way that many books 
fail: the writer misjudges his readers and 
does not properly adapt his treatment of the 
subject to them. He is too learned, or too 



36 Earmarks of Literature 

condescending, or uses words that are too big 
or too simple. I once heard a library trustee 
make an address at the opening of a new 
branch, on the supposition that those to whom 
he spoke were residents of the neighborhood, 
whereas they were library assistants who had 
come from all parts of the city. I once pre- 
pared an address explaining many features of 
library work to the general public, and had 
to deliver it, much to my chagrin, to an audi- 
ence of library workers who knew quite as 
much about the subject as I did. In all these 
cases there was lack of adaptation to the 
reader or the listener. 

As examples of literary efforts badly 
adapted to the occasion, take any effort that 
is purely "occasional" — a poem, an oration, 
an after-dinner speech. Half of them are cal- 
culated to throw the hearer into gloom when 
the day should be joyful, or to make him 
laugh hysterically at a funeral. This kind of 
literature is most freely undertaken by ama- 
teurs, and yet it is one of the hardest in which 
to succeed : hence the very few examples of 



Appropriateness of Style 37 

it that have been preserved as pure literature. 
There are a few : Lincoln's Gettysburg speech 
stands at the very head. Cicero delivered 
legal addresses in court that have been pre- 
served as models of literature. Bossuet's 
funeral orations are part of the treasures of 
French literature. But as for the average 
effort of this kind, it will, I fear, never find 
its way into our list of what is greatest and 
best. 

For examples of writing whose form is not 
in accord with its object we have to go no 
further than our familiar songs, from hymns 
down to the latest coon song. These consist 
of poetry that is intended to be set to music; 
that is its object. But in nine cases out of 
ten it is not well-fitted for a musical setting. 
Music has both accent and quantity; that is, 
there are accented notes, and also long and 
short notes. Now English poetry depends 
primarily on accent, not on quantity, as Latin 
poetry did; but quantity is still an important 
feature, and especially so in verse that is to 
be set to music. Some of the bad settings, to 



38 Earmarks of Literature 

be sure, are the fault of the musician, not 
of the poet. Sometimes the words were not 
intended by the poet to be set to music at 
all, in which case he can scarcely be held 
responsible. But if a writer deliberately 
writes, for a musical setting, words that it is 
difficult or impossible to set to music at all 
he is surely guilty of the literary sin of not 
adapting his style to his object. Equally 
guilty is he who writes, we will say, an adver- 
tisement in a way that makes his readers 
resolve that they will under no circumstances 
buy the articles that he advertises. I do not 
see why an advertisement should not be a work 
of pure literature, although I do not recollect 
ever seeing such a one. The " Spotless Town " 
Sapolio verses come pretty near it. 

Of course we do not quarrel with inappro- 
priateness that exists simply from lapse of 
time or change of place. Cicero's orations 
addressed to the Conscript Fathers do not 
cease to be good literature because the Con- 
script Fathers long ago ceased to exist. 
Neither do we deny the claims of many books 



Appropriateness of Style 39 

from foreign countries that conform to the 
standard of propriety where they were writ- 
ten, though that standard is not our own. A 
writer adapts his work to a single time and 
place; if it is good literature, it remains good 
though time and place change. Yet greatest 
of all is the literature that is appropriate to 
all times and all places — deals with the great 
facts and emotions of human life in such a 
way that it is universally true. This is the 
great literature of inspiration. 



N 



CHAPTER V 

Character in Style 

O MAN or woman is precisely like any 
other man or woman that ever was, is, 
or will be. This is what we mean when we 
speak of individuality; and when that indi- 
viduality shows itself in a person's writings, 
those writings are said to be characteristic. 

It is to this feature that the French writer 
referred when he said "style is the man." 
He uses the word " style" to mean character 
alone, and it is often so used ; in fact, we may 
consider all the other desirable features as 
part of it — clearness, correctness, appropri- 
ateness. If the man has a clear mind, his 
writing, if characteristic, will also be clear; 
if he has a strong sense of the fitness of things, 
his writing will be appropriate. If his mind 
is muddy and his taste bad, then his writings, 
if characteristic, will condemn him instead of 
winning him approval. 

40 



Character in Style 41 

But there is more than this in character. 
The best of it consists of combinations of deli- 
cate qualities that cannot be defined, but are 
easily recognized. How common it is for the 
reader of a letter to exclaim, "Now, doesn't 
that sound exactly like John?" Some sen- 
tence, some peculiar phraseology, some turn 
of thought, stamps the letter as the special 
product of one mind, with which we are 
familiar, and whose reflection we recognize 
in the written words. It is precisely the same 
with books. No one familiar with Dickens, 
with Thackeray, with Kipling, could read 
half a dozen pages of one of these writers 
without knowing which one was the author. 
If there is here and there a colorless passage 
without the stamp of the writer's individuality 
on it, we say simply, "That is not character- 
istic ; anyone might have written it." A book 
made up wholly of such passages cannot be a 
great book. If the writer is great; if he is a 
genius, a characteristic style may so far over- 
shadow all the other qualities that we have 
been considering that he may qualify as a 



42 Earmarks of Literature 

creator of literature, even though he is some- 
times ungrammatical, sometimes obscure, 
sometimes lacking in taste. Shakespeare 
occasionally sins in every one of these ways: 
yet he is the greatest figure in our literature. 
This is not to contradict what I have been 
saying about correctness, clearness, and taste; 
for great genius overrides rules. If you are 
a second Shakespeare we will forgive you an 
occasional lapse of this kind, but hardly other- 
wise. Posterity will sit in judgment on every 
writer who has claims to be called great, and 
Posterity is a hard judge. It may turn out, 
for instance, that Henry James and George 
Meredith may be denied admission to the 
inner circle on account of their lack of clear- 
ness, despite the fact that they have very 
characteristic and interesting styles. The ad- 
mirers of both these writers would say that 
their strong characters outweigh their faults, 
just as Shakespeare's does ; but what the final 
verdict will be we do not know. 

What is the mechanical method by which 
a man puts himself — translates himself, we 



Character in Style 43 

may say — into words? If we could describe 
it, and formulate effective rules for carrying 
it out, then any one of us could write like 
Shakespeare or Kipling or Poe. A good 
imitator, to be sure, can do very wonderful 
things in this direction; but he can hardly 
tell how, any more than a mimic can describe 
to you just how he is able to imitate the per- 
sonal peculiarities of an actor. After all, he 
can simply reproduce a few superficial tricks; 
he cannot give us the soul of the man, because 
it is not in his body. You see a man imitate 
Henry Irving or a woman imitate Nazimova 
and you say it is done to the life; yet the 
imitators could not play Shylock like the one, 
or Nora, in "The Doll's House," like the 
other; if they could they would be earning 
five hundred dollars a performance instead of 
five. So we often read successful short paro- 
dies of Carlyle, of Kipling, or of Poe; but 
the writers could not produce books like either 
of these. The style is the man; if the man 
is not there, the style in its fullness, its depth, 
its entirety, cannot be there either. The char- 



44 Earmarks of Literature 

acteristic of all great art is that it records the 
soul of the artist; the picture at which you 
look may be that of a house or a horse or a 
hill: if the artist is great he will tell you 
just how he was feeling when he studied that 
house or that hill : you will feel sad, or gay, or 
quiet, or inspired by it, just as he was. So 
with literary art; the writer may be describ- 
ing a riot or a herd of cows ; he may be writing 
a lyric or a set of resolutions: if he is an 
artist he will reproduce in his readers his own 
soul, as it was when he wrote. This is why 
the great artists are great, be they artists in 
tone — great musicians, artists in form — 
great painters and sculptors, or artists in words 
— great writers. 

Here we may return for a moment to the 
subject-matter of the works whose claims to 
be considered as great literature we are con- 
sidering. From our present standpoint it is 
important only as furnishing the author an 
opportunity to reveal himself. Obviously an 
enthusiastic political reformer would not 
choose as such a vehicle a treatise on painting 



Character in Style 45 

or a passionate lover of nature a book on the 
history of the Middle Ages. But when a 
skilled writer writes on what he loves he can 
make it great literature, whether he tries to 
do so or not. Ruskin was an art critic; he 
wrote to convert his readers to his views, but 
in so doing he made great literature. Gibbon 
wrote a history of the decline and fall of the 
Roman Empire; in doing this he produced 
great literature. If each had written on the 
other's subject the result might have been 
good, but not great. 

From this point of view the choice of a 
subject is important. And it is equally so 
from the reader's standpoint. He will nat- 
urally appreciate most thoroughly great 
literature whose subject is likely to rouse 
enthusiasm in him. This is why the literature 
that is most universally appreciated is on sub- 
jects that have a universal appeal — that voice 
the great emotions of humanity — love, grief, 
pity, and so on. It is none the less true, how- 
ever, that, except indirectly, the subject is not 
an element of the literature's greatness any 



46 Earmarks of Literature 

more than the material of which a statue is 
made contributes to its artistic excellence. 
Certain materials are fit, while others are 
unfit; bronze and marble are better than 
tallow, and molasses could not be used at all, 
but it is what the sculptor does with his bronze 
or marble — what he reveals with it, what he 
teaches through it — that matters. So it is 
what the historian does with his story, what 
the art essayist does with his criticism, that 
makes it literature — that sets him on high 
with Ruskin and Gibbon or ranks him with 
the most trivial writer of the daily press. 



s 



CHAPTER VI 

Special Literary Forms 

PECIAL kinds of literary form are not 
arbitrary; they are born of some necessity 
and are efforts to follow some line of least 
resistance. There are hundreds of them that 
we do not recognize and that are trivial in 
origin or results. Take, for instance, the tele- 
graphic form, born of the necessity of putting 
an intelligible message into the fewest pos- 
sible words. It is marked especially by its 
omissions. 

Thus, when a man wishes to telegraph, 
"Your proposition is satisfactory to me as you 
have finally modified it, and you may expect 
me on the train that arrives about noon. 
Please notify our friends in New York that 
I am coming," he may put it into ten words 
as follows : " Proposition satisfactory as modi- 
fied. Coming noon train. Notify New 
York." This is as much a special literary 

47 



48 Earmarks of Literature 

form as poetry or the drama. Another form 
that is born of necessity for brevity is the 
newspaper headline. Here the writer is con- 
fined to a certain number of letters instead of 
a certain number of words, as in the telegram. 
The writing of inscriptions, long recognized 
as an important and serious form of literature, 
is limited in much the same way. We shall 
consider here only one or two of these special 
literary forms, and those the most widely 
recognized and most important. 

Poetry 

Most persons, if asked what is most neces- 
sary to poetry, would say that it must have 
meter and rhyme; yet there has been poetry 
without either. In particular, much ancient 
Teutonic poetry depended on alliteration — 
the beginning of certain conspicuous words 
with the same sound — a property akin to 
rhyme, where the similar sounds are at the 
end, but not at all like it in effect. What is 
called meter, also, has varied greatly in its 
elements; Latin meter, for instance, depends 



Special Literary Forms 49 

chiefly on quantity, or the length of syllables, 
while English meter depends chiefly on accent 
or the stress given to certain syllables in pro- 
nunciation. It is quite possible that other 
ways of writing poetry may be found in the 
future, so that we may only say that it is a 
form of literary expression in which the words 
are given some kind of symmetry marked by 
regular recurrence of quantity, accent, similar 
sounds, or the like. 

We shall consider here chiefly English 
poetry, whose characteristic is the regular 
recurrence of accent. The recurrence of 
accent is a strong characteristic of all English 
speech, marking it off distinctly from such a 
language as the French, which has practically 
none. Unfortunately, the word "accent" is 
commonly used in two senses — "stress" and 
" intonation." When we speak of a " French 
accent" we mean a French intonation. The 
marks called "accents," used over certain 
French vowels, simply indicate special pro- 
nunciations. The absence of stress is a pecu- 
liarity of French intonation. One may imitate 



50 Earmarks of Literature 

a Frenchman very well by simply pronounc- 
ing an English sentence with great care that 
precisely the same stress is bestowed on each 
syllable and word. In pronouncing a word 
of two or more syllables, the English-speaking 
person always puts in one primary or strong 
accent and as many secondary or weak ones 
as may be necessary, and in indicating the 
pronunciation of a word the location of these 
accents is very important. It is difficult to 
explain to a Frenchman what this means, just 
as it is difficult for a Chinaman to explain 
to us that in his language musical pitch is an 
important element of pronunciation. 

Now, just as we accent the syllables of our 
words, so we accent the words in our sen- 
tences.* We instinctively try to make these 
accented words in prose fall at as regular 
intervals of time as possible, by slowing up 
where there are few or no words between 
accents and by hurrying where there are many. 
Thus, we say naturally: 
S'ay ! are you | go'ing down | to'wn this | ev'ening? 

*A very interesting book on this subject, Saintsbury's 
Rhythm of English Prose, has just been published. 



Special Literary Forms 51 

Now, the chief difference between English 
poetry and English prose is that in the former 
the number of syllables between accents is 
made uniform, so that if spoken uniformly, 
without dragging or hurrying in any part, the 
accents will fall at regular time intervals. 
There are many modifications of this — poetry 
with elements of prose, and prose with some 
of the features of poetry — but this is the 
broad principle. Hitherto, we have said 
nothing about quantity. Unfortunately, again, 
this word is used in two senses. Writers on 
English verse have used it to mean the dif- 
ference between accent and the lack of accent, 
calling an accented syllable long and an 
unaccented one short. It really depends on 
the time it takes to pronounce a syllable. 
Take, for instance, the three monosyllables 
"fat," "fair," and "fenced." The first is 
uttered in a very short time, while it takes 
longer to say either of the other two, one 
because of the character of the vowel sounds 
and the other because of the combination of 
final consonants. Latin and Greek meter 



52 Earmarks of Literature 

depended entirely on quantity — the proper 
succession of long and short syllables. In 
English, while the meter does not depend on 
quantity, it may be improved or spoiled by 
giving attention to quantity. Verses in which 
the accented syllables are long and the unac- 
cented ones short are recognized by most 
persons as " smooth" and " flowing." Where 
a long syllable, especially one where there 
is a combination of consonants, is unaccented, 
the verse is harsh. Of course, a poet may 
make verse harsh on purpose to produce an 
effect. 

Another element of poetry is alliteration, 
spoken of above as the distinctive feature of 
old Teutonic poetry. It is used by Wagner in 
his music-dramas and is found in all very 
early English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. It is 
used in modern English poetry only to 
heighten an effect, and may be very effectively 
employed. 

When we think of a line that we have just 
read, " How fine that is! how well expressed!" 
we shall often find by examination that quan- 



Special Literary Forms 53 

tity and alliteration, skilfully used, are 
responsible for the effect. 

Drama 

So far as drama is a special literary form, 
that form is born of the necessities arising 
from stage representation. Thus there is a 
very rigid time limitation, a division into 
scenes and acts, close attention to the action of 
the piece, the necessity of adapting the words 
to the positions and movements of the actors, 
and so on. These limitations are joined to 
the necessity of making the whole seem, 
to the audience, natural and spontaneous, 
although it is really not so. All this makes 
drama the most difficult of literary forms, 
especially when it is written in poetry, joining 
two kinds of form with two sets of limitations 
to observe. Writers have tried to emancipate 
themselves from the tyranny of these forms, 
but they are based on obvious necessities, so 
little can be done. In former times it was 
considered that certain "unities" must be 
observed, chiefly those of time and place. 



54 Earmarks of Literature 

According to these, a play should occupy the 
same time that the action represented would 
really occupy, and the scene should not shift 
about from place to place. Such limitations 
are not necessary, and hamper the writer 
unduly. They are now seldom observed. 
Playwrights suppose years to elapse between 
acts, and they shift the scene from Africa to 
Europe without warning. 

We have also dramas intended not to be 
acted, but merely to be read; and in these 
the writers have been able to throw off the 
burden of dramatic form except in so far as 
they desire to use it to produce their effects. 
In this way we have poems in the "form" 
of drama that it would be absurd to try to 
act. These efforts are hybrids, and although 
some of the greatest figures in literature have 
composed them they rarely make a universal 
appeal. When they do so, it is usually for 
reasons unconnected with the peculiar form, 
as in the case of works like Goethe's Faust. 

Of late it has been customary to rewrite 
popular fiction in dramatic form and enact it 



Special Literary Forms 55 

on the stage. Still more recently popular 
plays have been rewritten as novels. These 
dramatized novels and " novelized" dramas 
labor under the disadvantage that they are 
translations from one kind of literary form to 
another. Such translation is difficult, though 
not impossible, and it has not generally been 
executed by competent hands. The original 
author may be the very worst person to do 
it, for he generally is not familiar with both 
forms. Dramatization has been more success- 
ful than " novelization " because the play- 
wrights who have done the work have usually 
been technically competent. "Novelization" 
has so far been successfully accomplished 
rarely, if at all. And neither of these kinds 
of transfer from one literary form to another 
is well calculated to produce a work of 
literature. 

Oratory 

Like the playwright, the writer of an ora- 
tion composes not to be read but to be listened 
to. Besides this limitation his object usually 
is to convince his hearers of something, and 



56 Earmarks of Literature 

the form is adapted to that end. Language 
that is to be heard, not read, is hampered by 
the fact that the hearer can take in only what 
the speaker is saying at the time; he cannot 
grasp a paragraph at a glance, nor can he 
look ahead at all to see what is coming. Cer- 
tain constructions allowable in written speech, 
therefore, are objectionable in an oration. On 
the other hand, the speaker has an opportunity 
of making his meaning clear, by emphasis and 
intonation, that is denied to the writer; so that 
in some cases a passage that would be evident 
to the listener reads somewhat obscurely. 

Again, the writer of words that are to be 
read, not heard, must reason somewhat closely 
and pay attention to his points, for the reader 
has him at a disadvantage. His words, set 
down in black and white, may be re-read, 
studied, and compared with what is said on 
another page. This cannot be done by a lis- 
tener. It is easier, therefore, for an orator 
to appeal to emotions and to prejudices, and 
this is often done. The style used is adapted 
to this aim, and in reading some orations that 



Special Literary Forms 57 

move the hearer powerfully, we often wonder 
what could possibly have produced that effect. 
In other cases, where the orator and his audi- 
ence are in sympathy from the start, the 
wording may be as simple as possible, and 
all the more moving for its simplicity. This 
is the case with Lincoln's Gettysburg address. 
In general, to get the full effect of an oration 
we must hear it recited, just as to get the full 
effect of a play we must see it acted on the 
stage. 

The Novel 

Some may say that there is no special lit- 
erary form appropriate to the novel, and it 
is true that it is the freest of all forms, but 
the writer must observe certain literary rules, 
as well as those that apply directly to his 
management of the story, with which we have 
nothing to do here. Some of these rules are 
apparently unknown to writers generally, for 
they are constantly broken. Take, for in- 
stance, the difference between a passage 
merely supposed to be reported by the writer 
and one actually supposed to be written by 



58 Earmarks of Literature 

one of the characters. Novelists often make 
the mistake of writing down a letter not as 
the writer would write it, but as it might be 
taken down by someone else. For instance, 
if the writer is a cockney he is made to write 
" 'alf " for half and " hactive " for active. He 
would pronounce the words in that way, but 
not write them. 

Characters are often made to use language 
unsuited to them, and, in particular, conver- 
sations are often stilted and unnatural. We 
recognize this when we say . that a person 
"talks like a book." Characters in a book 
should not "talk like a book" if they are to 
give the impression of naturalness. 

The way in which the writer of a novel 
treats his own personality is responsible for 
various marked forms in romance. For 
example, a story may assume the form of an 
autobiography, the supposed writer being 
also the hero or heroine; or the supposed 
writer may be some secondary character in 
the story. In both these cases there is much 
use of the first person, and the narrator is 



Special Literary Forms 59 

brought into the foreground. In other cases 
the narrator is not identified, and there is 
nothing in the novel that betrays who he is or 
liow he knows what he is writing about. In 
other books the narrator frankly puts himself 
forward from time to time as the writer of a 
fictitious story. He speaks of "our hero" and 
discusses the tale with the reader in such a way 
as to leave no illusion of reality. This is 
rather an old-fashioned method of treatment. 

Whichever treatment is selected, the writer 
must be consistent. If he is writing as the 
hero he should not describe scenes at which 
he was not present, without letting the reader 
know how he was informed of them. If he 
tells the story as a real series of events written 
by a real person, he should not drop into the 
character of an avowed narrator of fiction. 
These are all special forms, although the lack 
of formality in them makes it difficult to 
recognize them as such. 

This is enough to show, perhaps, that a 
novel writer cannot altogether ignore literary 
form. The limitations under which he works, 



60 Earmarks of Literature 

however, are so vague and peculiar that he 
usually does disregard them. Readers are 
often at a loss to know why one novel is good 
and another bad, why one interests him and 
holds his attention while the other does not. 
Aside from considerations connected with the 
character of the story, the reason may often 
be found in the superior care with which the 
better writer, consciously or unconsciously, has 
adhered to the literary form that is proper 
for a prose romance. 



p 



CHAPTER VII 

On the Reading of Poetry Aloud 

OETRY is essentially a form of spoken, 
not of written language. Its elements 
depend on the sound of words, not on their 
appearance on the printed page. An occa- 
sional attempt by the poets to introduce " eye- 
rhymes," as of " cough " with " bough," or the 
like, has not met with favor. One who reads 
verse silently to himself must at least imagine 
the sound of the words if he is to appreciate 
it as poetry. The very fact that it is poetry 
instead of prose implies fitness for reading 
aloud or for recitation. 

Now, there are those who counsel the 
readers of poetry to treat it precisely like prose 
— to make no pauses or to give no accents 
that would not be made or given if the passage 
were not poetry at all. From one point of 
view this is just. In poetry words should be 
so arranged that the natural accents fall into 

61 



62 Earmarks of Literature 

rhythmic sequence, so that if read naturally 
the fact that the passage is poetry appears at 
once, and the effect on the listener is that of 
poetry, not prose. There are passages that 
may be treated in just this way. It would be 
hard, for instance, to read such verses as this 
without showing that they are poetry : 

On Linden, when the sun was low, 
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, 
And dark as winter was the flow 
Of Iser, rolling rapidly. 

Or this: 

The little toy dog is covered with dust, 
Yet sturdy and stanch he stands; 
And the little tin soldier is red with rust 
And his musket moulds in his hands. 

In both of these extracts the rhyme aids 
the meter in marking off the lines and empha- 
sizing the poetical character of the composi- 
tion. If either were written as prose, the 
reader would not go far before finding that 
he was being tricked. For instance: 

On Linden, when the sun was low, all bloodless 



Reading Poetry Aloud 63 

lay the untrodden snow, and dark as winter was 
the flow of Iser, rolling rapidly. 

This reminds one of the paragraphs in the 
newspapers where verse is printed as prose to 
enhance its humorous effect. If all poetry 
were carefully constructed with a view to this 
kind of reading, the advice to disregard its 
structure would be sound. But it is not so. 
Consider the following passage: 

To him who in the love of Nature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
A various language. 

Here there is no rhyme and no rhetorical 
pause at the end of either line. If it were 
written as prose, the reader who did not pre- 
viously know that it was verse might have 
difficulty in recognizing it as such. Thus : 

To him who, in the love of Nature, holds com- 
munion with her visible forms, she speaks a vari- 
ous language. 

Here the trouble is largely with the length 
of the lines, the distribution of pauses and the 
lack of rhyme. But in poetry in general, 



64 Earmarks of Literature 

besides syllables that call for an accent and 
those that demand to be left unaccented, there 
are others that may or may not receive stress, 
at the reader's will. Even in the strict and 
formal quantitative verse of the ancients, there 
were "common" or doubtful quantities as 
well as long and short ones. Besides this, 
much verse is purposely rugged, and disre- 
gards accent more or less; and its rhythmic 
quality depends on the watchfulness of the 
reader in bringing out stress in places where 
it would not be given in the natural reading 
of prose. Of course, this requires judgment. 
If the reader remembers simply that what he 
reads has rhythm and forgets that it has also 
sense, his reading will degenerate into a mean- 
ingless sing-song. If he regards the sense and 
forgets the rhythm it will often sound like 
plain prose, and rather odd prose at that. 
Oftener still the listener will be annoyed and 
pained by an involuntary effort to catch the 
rhythm, which prevents his enjoyment of the 
verse as a whole. 

This is what makes the reading of poetry 



Reading Poetry Aloud 65 

difficult. What, for instance, shall the reader 
do at the end of a line where there is no 
rhetorical pause? If he reads straight ahead, 
he goes far towards turning the verse into 
prose. If he pauses, he spoils the sense and 
makes his performance childish and ridicu- 
lous. It is possible for him to indicate the 
meter and the succession of lines — now by an 
almost unnoticeable pause, now by an inflec- 
tion of voice — so that the listener may recog- 
nize the metric quality of what he hears 
without being conscious that there is inter- 
ference with the sense. The art of the great 
actor, in declaiming Shakespearean or other 
metrical drama, depends largely upon pre- 
cisely this ability. 

Some lines of poetry may be interpreted 
rhythmically in more than one way. The 
other lines in the stanza generally give the 
key, but the reader might read the line in 
more than one way if it stood by itself. Those 
who believe that the reader should not con- 
cern himself with the meter will not object to 
this, but if the meter is to be brought out in 



66 Earmarks of Literature 

reading it is important for the reader to know 
what it is. Sometimes he meets with this kind 
of line at the very beginning of his selection, 
and these doubtful lines, owing to the pecu- 
liarities of English poetry, are specially easy 
to write in our language. 

Take, for instance, the first line of Enid's 
celebrated and beautiful song in Tennyson's 
Idylls: 

Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel, and lower the 
proud 

This may be read, or sung, in at least three 
ways, having, respectively, six, five, and seven 
" feet," as follows : 

Tu'rn — | Fo'r-tune | tu'rn thy | wh'eel and | 
lo'wer the | pr'oud — 

Turn, F'or | tune tu'rn | thy wh'eel | and lo'w | 
er the pro'ud 

Tu'rn — | Fo'r-tune | tu'rn thy | wh'eel — | 
JLand | lo'wer the | pr'oud — • 

From one standpoint, these ambiguous lines 
are objectionable ; from another the ambiguity 
may be thought an additional beauty. The 



Reading Poetry Aloud 67 

rhythm shifts and changes as we think of it, 
so that to the steadfast progress of the meter 
is added a sinuous motion, which may either 
exasperate or fascinate. 

In composing music for the lines of a poet, 
musicians have generally taken great liberties 
with his meter, so that the rhythm of the lines 
when sung is not at all that as read, which is 
that bestowed on them by the author. 
Musicians think that this alteration is justifi- 
able and that it even lends additional beauty 
to the words, probably on the theory just 
suggested. Instances will occur to anyone. 
It is a fact that the number of meters com- 
monly used for singing is small ; and if com- 
posers followed them slavishly in their music 
monotony would result. Perhaps this is the 
fault of the poets in not devising and using 
new meters. This has been done notably by 
Kipling, some of whose rhythms seem to have 
been borrowed from musical forms — often 
from dance music. The Last Chantey is a 
conspicuous instance. 

Unfortunately, many of our best songs — 



68 Earmarks of Literature 

practically all those in operatic music — are 
by foreigners, and the words have to be 
translated. It is most difficult to translate 
poetry; and when in addition the translation 
must be adapted to precisely the same music 
as the original, the task becomes impossible. 
The translator is generally content with writ- 
ing another song that expresses the sentiments 
of the original, but in entirely different words. 
This is the reason why the English words of 
foreign operas and of most songs by French 
or German composers are apt to be trivial 
or silly. This is unfortunate, because it has 
led music-lovers to disregard the words in 
vocal music and to dwell wholly on the 
musical setting. In reality singing is a special 
case of reading poetry aloud. The music 
should aid in interpreting the words, so that 
a poem, properly set to music and properly 
sung, should mean more to the listener than 
if it were simply read. Wagner was the first 
writer of operas to realize this, and his music 
cannot be fully appreciated unless the words 
are heard and understood. 



Reading Poetry Aloud 69 

The listener who finds himself bored by the 
long monologues in Wagner's music-dramas, 
those of Wotan in Siegfried, for instance, is 
usually he who does not understand the words, 
or does not attend to them, and expects to be 
impressed by the music alone. This is true 
also of the typical recitative of the Italian 
opera, only here the composer himself, in too 
many instances, disregarded the words, which 
are often trivial even in the original tongue, 
and quite worthless in translation. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Our Two Languages 

nr^HE very derivation of the word "liter- 
-*■ ature" — from the Latin litem, a letter 
— implies that it has to do with written lan- 
guage. Most persons think that written 
language is merely spoken language set down 
in black and white. In some cases it is this, 
in others it is something very different. The 
two methods of expressing ideas are different 
in their origins. When it became necessary 
to express ideas by sounds, such expression 
arose in various ways. Some think that the 
earliest attempt at speech was when the sound 
made by an animal was adopted as its name, 
as when the baby calls a dog a " bow-wow." 
However this may be, it is certain that the 
first attempt to make a written sign for a 
thing had nothing to do with any sound made 
by or in connection with that thing, but was 
simply a rude picture of it. Such pictures, 

70 



Our Two Languages 71 

greatly conventionalized, and so modified as 
to have lost their value as pictures altogether, 
are still used in some parts of the world; for 
instance, in China, where there is no alphabet, 
in our sense of the word, every character 
standing for a whole word. This seems 
absurd and difficult to us. It seems vastly 
easier to learn twenty-six characters than to 
become familiar with thousands ; yet we must 
remember that the practiced reader of any 
language reads his words as wholes and rec- 
ognizes each without stopping to separate it 
mentally into its letters. So that we read in 
the Chinese fashion after all; and children 
are generally so taught in modern schools. 

Our letters, each of which is supposed to 
stand for a sound, arose from the adoption of 
these picture-characters to represent, in each 
case, the sound with which the spoken name 
of the pictured character began. In lan- 
guages that use an alphabet, therefore, the 
written and spoken forms were, at the time 
of its adoption, closely correspondent, while 
in Japanese and Chinese, for instance, they 



72 Earmarks of Literature 

may be widely different. Two Chinese, whose 
dialects sound to each other like foreign 
tongues, may understand each other clearly 
in writing. So a Frenchman who pronounced 
English very badly might be totally unable 
to make you understand him; yet when he 
wrote the words down they would be intel- 
ligible at once. In Chinese the character does 
not represent the sound of a word signifying 
a thing; it stands for the thing itself. In 
English the written word " cow" not only sig- 
nifies the animal but it also stands for the 
combination of sounds that forms the spoken 
word "cow." 

So, in the beginning, that is, when English 
words first began to be written in Roman let- 
ters, there were for every word three things 
that closely corresponded : 

i. The object or idea signified. 

2. The spoken word. 

3. The written word. 

These things at once began to change, so 
as to make their continued correspondence 



Our Two Languages 73 

difficult, The degrees of change depended on 
circumstances. In some cases the object itself 
changed hardly at all; in others, it is quite a 
different thing now from what it was when 
its name began to be spelled. A house, for 
instance, is not now the same as a house in the 
tenth century, nor is a ship or a hat; although 
a horse is practically the same. Some things 
have changed so utterly that we must have 
new names for them, though the tendency is 
to retain the old ones. And we have a host 
of new things altogether, for some of which 
we have made new names, while we have 
simply applied old ones to others. So our 
modern dictionaries are complicated affairs. 
We see from them that a single word may 
have scores of meanings and that a single 
object or idea may be expressed by any one 
of a dozen different words. 

The spoken word also has changed, always 
a little, sometimes utterly. This we usually 
call change of " pronunciation." It used to be 
a difficult thing to record. We try to do it 
now by scientific alphabets and diacritical 



74 Earmarks of Literature 

marks, but we have a better way still — the 
phonograph. Museums of records are being 
formed abroad to store up data about present- 
day pronunciation. Unfortunately, we have 
none yet in this country. 

If the material of the records lasts, our 
great-great grandchildren will know how we 
talked. As for us, we absolutely do not know 
how our great-great grandsires talked, except 
that they talked very differently from us. We 
think the Irish " brogue" a queer thing, but 
it is believed that the Irish still talk English 
as our ancestors taught it to them ; their brogue 
is the spoken tongue of seventeenth-century 
Englishmen. 

The written word is unchangeable, or it 
would be if we were to let it alone. We 
probably should let it alone if, like the Chi- 
nese character, it represented an idea rather 
than the sound of a spoken word. As it is, 
we are not only introducing new words to 
signify new things, but we are altering the 
spelling of our written words in an attempt 
to follow the changes of sound in our spoken 



Our Two Languages 75 

words. If the spoken words are the important 
things, perhaps this is defensible, but from 
the standpoint of literature the written word 
is the important thing; we use it for recording 
thought, and if we are going to change it the 
time will come when we shall not be able to 
read our records. 

The alteration of spelling to fit the changed 
sounds of words is often called spelling 
reform. Reform is, or should be, the restora- 
tion of some good thing that has been changed 
or lost. In this instance the thing that has 
changed is the sound of the word — the pro- 
nunciation. If there is to be reform, then, we 
should go back to the old sound — not make a 
further change by altering the spelling. 

Writing has done much to keep one form 
of language steady. It is to be hoped that the 
phonograph is going to do the same thing for 
the spoken form. If this should prove to be 
the case, the problem that some have attempted 
to solve by what is called "spelling reform" 
may ultimately cease to present itself. 



w 



CHAPTER IX 

The Structure of Literature 

E ARE apt to think of all written 
language as made up of letters more 
or less like our own. We know that many 
foreign alphabets closely resemble ours. Such 
are the German, the Russian, even the Greek; 
and we assume that other characters, such as 
those used by the Chinese and Japanese, or 
the Hebrew and Arabic characters, are of the 
same nature. This is not the case. Hebrew 
and Arabic have characters to represent 
consonants only. Chinese and Japanese 
characters are not letters — the Chinese are 
ideographs and the Japanese represent not 
elementary sounds, but syllables. In Chinese 
every word is monosyllabic, so that the char- 
acters represent also words. 

Modern languages are of three kinds, rep- 
resenting, it is thought, three different stages 
of development. There is the syllabic stage, 

76 



The Structure of Literature 77 

when every word has one syllable, and ideas 
are expressed by stringing these one-syllabled 
words along without changing any of them. 
Such is the Chinese. In Chinese there are no 
separate " parts of speech," as we understand 
these words, and no grammar. The Chinese, 
for instance, instead of saying, " At what time 
do you go to bed?" says, "You here all are 
what time sleep feel?" If he wishes to say, 
"To wash the hands and face is a necessary 
part of each day's work," he puts it: "Wash 
hands wash face this is day day less not finish 
of affair." 

Secondly, we have languages where the 
syllables denoting different ideas are fastened 
together with some degree of permanence to 
denote complex ideas. These are called 
agglutinative tongues — languages where the 
elements are simply "stuck together," as it 
were. The American Indian languages were 
all of this type, and the Japanese is now its 
foremost representative. Some words in Eng- 
lish are agglutinative. Prof. W. D. Whitney 
gives " un-tru-th-ful-ly," as an example. Here 



78 Earmarks of Literature 

each syllable has its meaning. In Japanese, 
the combination of separate root-words, which 
is very common, does not tend to produce 
formative elements, as it does with us. 
Turkish is similarly agglutinative, but with 
greater complexity, admitting such intricate 
derivatives as " sev-ish-dir-il-e-me-mek " — 
" Not to be capable of being made to love one 
another." 

Lastly, we have inflected speech, where 
a word is modified, either by altering the 
root somewhat, or using prefixes or suffixes 
with it to denote changed relationships. All 
of the languages commonly studied in our 
schools, both ancient and modern, are of this 
type. In Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, or 
French, the verb has different forms for its 
different moods and tenses, the noun for its 
different cases, the adjective for its degrees — 
all made in this way. It may be that these 
changes are all that remain of an original 
agglutinative process, and that prefixes, case- 
endings, mood-signs, etc., were once separate 
syllabic words. In his interesting book about 



The Structure of Literature 79 

the Eskimos, Vilhjalmur Stefansson indicates 
that their tongue has both inflectional and 
agglutinative features, and is possibly chang- 
ing from the latter to the former type. 

It is not so certain, however, as was once 
supposed, that these three forms of language 
are three definite stages through which all 
language has passed. The most highly in- 
flected tongues are not the most modern, but 
languages like Homeric Greek, that were 
spoken thousands of years ago. The modern 
languages are dropping off their inflections, 
and our own language has in many respects 
ceased to be an inflected tongue at all. There 
is no separate form for the objective case ex- 
cept in pronouns, and the only noun inflection 
is for the possessive. Even here the idea of 
possession can also be expressed by the use of 
the preposition "of," and there is some reason 
to think that this non-inflected possessive is 
driving the other out. Most of our verb rela- 
tions are expressed, not by inflection, but by 
the use of auxiliaries — such as the simple 
verbs "to be," "to do," and "to have." We 



80 Earmarks of Literature 

denote future action, not by adding an ending 
to the root of our verb, but by using the aux- 
iliary verbs " shall " and "will." For past ac- 
tion we may still use an inflected form, made 
either by changing the vowel in the root, as 
from "speak" to "spoke," or by adding -ed, 
as in the words " granted " or " shocked." But 
we may also express the same idea by the 
past tense of the auxiliary verb "do" — "did 
speak," " did grant," etc. 

This loss of inflectional forms is recent. In 
its earliest written form, generally known as 
"Anglo-Saxon," English is almost as fully 
inflected as Latin. 

It also looks as if, besides losing our inflec- 
tions, the distinction between our parts of 
speech were becoming weaker. It may even 
be said that there is no part of speech in 
English that may not be used in place of any 
other part, at least colloquially. Thus, we 
use verbs as nouns, as when we speak of the 
"kill" of a lion or the "take" of a compos- 
itor; nouns as verbs, as when we "motor" or 
"dust;" nouns as adjectives, in speaking of a 



The Structure of Literature 81 



" concrete" house or an " angel" child, and 
so on. In this respect, therefore, English is 
getting more like Chinese, and it has been 
suggested that the lack of grammar in such a 
language may be a sign of age and not of 
undeveloped youth. 

To go back to the written forms of lan- 
guage, the syllabic and agglutinative tongues 
usually employ not alphabets but syllabaries. 
Naturally this requires a vast number of char- 
acters. In Chinese there are in the great 
standard dictionary no less than 41,000 one- 
syllabled words, each of which has its separate 
character. For ordinary purposes it is suffi- 
cient to learn about 2,500 to 3,500 of these 
characters. 

In Japanese there are two syllabaries — the 
Katakana, which is the simpler, and the 
Hiragana, which is the more popular, as it 
can be written more smoothly and continu- 
ously, like the letters used in our " hand- 
writing." Each of the Japanese characters 
represents a consonant combined with a vowel, 
so that they may be learned in series — ba, be, 



82 Earmarks of Literature 

bi, bo, bu ; ta, te, ti, to, tu, etc., which makes 
them more systematic than the Chinese. 

An alphabet is usually regarded as more 
convenient than a syllabary, but it is not so 
much so as we are apt to think. No experi- 
enced reader picks out the separate letters of 
the alphabet that form a word. He recognizes 
the word as a whole, just as he would do if it 
were represented by one character, as in Chi- 
nese, or by one for each of its syllables, as in 
Japanese. Arabic has an alphabet, but the 
vowels have no corresponding letters, being 
represented by points over the consonants with 
which they are associated. A consonant, with 
its vowel point, thus very nearly takes the 
place of a syllabic character such as those of 
the Japanese syllabaries. In ancient Hebrew, 
which is of the same family of languages as 
the Arabic, even the points for the vowels 
were omitted, and the vowel had to be guessed. 
Here we have a sliding scale connecting the 
syllabaries with the alphabets, starting with 
a pure ideographic syllabary like the Chinese 
and running through the Japanese, by way of 



The Structure of Literature 83 

the Hebrew and Arabic, down to alphabets 
of the modern form. Even these have some 
peculiarities that connect them with the sylla- 
baries. The names of our consonants, for 
instance, Be, De, Ef, Jay, etc., are purely syl- 
labic. Then, some of them represent not simple 
sounds but combinations. In the Russian al- 
phabet there is a single character for the 
sound represented in English by ch, as in 
" church." French requires three letters for 
this sound, namely tch, and German has to 
use four — tsch. The English letter "j" rep- 
resents a complex sound which in French re- 
quires d) to express it. 

If our spelling were strictly phonetic — one 
sound to a letter and one letter to a sound — an 
alphabet would be much preferable to a sylla- 
bary, not for ordinary reading, but in indicat- 
ing the pronunciation of a strange word and 
in assisting the learner to some extent. As it 
is, it is often but a stumbling block. 

Since the introduction of western learning, 
Chinese and Japanese, especially the latter, 
are sometimes written with the Roman alpha- 



84 Earmarks of Literature 

bet. It is not possible to do this, or indeed to 
use any alphabet or syllabary in place of any 
other, without making some arbitrary rules 
to govern the change. No two persons would 
do it in the same way. Such changes have 
been productive of much confusion. 

Even in so simple a matter as the writing 
of Russian in Roman characters, there are 
several different systems in use. The same 
Russian termination, for instance, is written 
as off, ov, and ow. The same Russian letter 
appears as ch, tch, and tsch. This is due 
partly to the fact that the Roman letters, as 
used in different tongues, do not always have 
the same value. 

Commercial contact and the necessities of 
trade are operating in all these things in a 
direction contrary to the requirements of lit- 
erature as an art. Commerce and communi- 
cation demand the unification of alphabets, 
the abolition of syllabaries, even the fusing 
of languages. But from the artistic standpoint 
these things should not be. The Arabs, for in- 
stance, have developed a beautiful language 



The Structure of Literature 85 

with a fine, characteristic literature corre- 
sponding to their inborn and inbred character, 
customs, and modes of thought. Their al- 
phabet and mode of writing is part of it. The 
translation of such a tongue makes it lose its 
atmosphere; even its transliteration into 
Roman alphabetic signs destroys its peculiar 
color to the eye. From the standpoint of lit- 
erature as an art, these should be preserved. 
We have seen that in literature the way of 
doing things is all-important; and things have 
been said and written in the Chinese, Arabic, 
and Bengali languages and characters in a 
way that never would have existed had those 
nations spoken English and used the Roman 
alphabet. 

This tendency of commercial needs to de- 
stroy literary values has led to the plan — it 
is hardly more than a dream yet — of an arti- 
ficial world-language. If we had this kind of 
a language business might be transacted in it 
without injuring the separate use and develop- 
ment of local languages and literatures. 

Unfortunately, no artificial language has 



86 Earmarks of Literature 

yet been constructed that has met, or is likely 
to meet, with universal approval. Language 
is a thing of growth, not of invention. In 
other fields, to be sure, man has replaced 
things that grow with things specially devised 
and constructed. Machines are everywhere 
taking the place of animals or of man himself. 
There is no inherent reason why an invented 
language should not prove satisfactory. But 
it took long years to introduce machinery, and 
we may expect that invented tongues will ex- 
perience the same opposition and inertia. 
Probably the particular line of least resist- 
ance has not yet been found. Volapuk, once 
a promising candidate, is now little regarded. 
Esperanto, after making much progress, is 
being discarded by many for Ido, which they 
regard as an improvement. All these tongues 
are yet in the laboratory stage. They are not 
actually " on the market." 



A 



CHAPTER X 

Literature as a Form of Art 

RT aims to make a special appeal to the 
feelings as opposed to the reasoning 
powers. This is true of literature as a form 
of art, just as it is of painting or sculpture 
or music. This is why, as we have seen above, 
the way of doing is more important than the 
subject-matter in literature, for it is so with 
all arts that have a subject-matter — with 
what are called representative arts. Such arts 
are painting and sculpture, in so far as they 
represent actual objects, as opposed to music, 
which represents nothing but itself, or to 
merely geometrical decoration. If the sub- 
ject-matter were of prime importance in such 
art, then one statuette of a wolf would be as 
good as another, all paintings of Pike's Peak 
would be of equal merit, and so on. In non- 
representative arts, like music or some forms 
of decoration, as there is no subject-matter, 

87 



88 Earmarks of Literature 

no representation of anything else, the art is 
all manner; there is nothing at all to it except 
the way in which it is done. 

Music, to be sure, has occasionally made 
an effort to represent something — the songs 
of birds, or the noise of a battle, perhaps. 
Such music belongs to the type known as 
"program music," and if we admit its claims 
to legitimacy we may say precisely the same 
thing about it as about painting and sculp- 
ture — otherwise the music sung by the bird 
in Wagner's music-drama of Siegfried would 
be no whit better than the melody of "The 
Mocking Bird." 

When we say, therefore, that the manner 
and not the matter of a poem or an essay makes 
it literature, we are merely citing a special 
case of a general rule that applies to all art. 

And it is only the same rule, stated a little 
differently, that limits the effect of art, as art, 
to its action on the feelings. Art may make 
us feel in various ways. It may arouse grief, 
anger, joy, or admiration. It may be simply 
beautiful, but it may also be touching, amus- 



Literature as a Form of Art 89 

ing, or inspiring. But it cannot prove a prop- 
osition. It may cause you to believe that a 
proposition is true, but it does so through the 
feelings, not through the intellect. And of 
a purely intellectual proposition, such as are 
those of mathematics, it has nothing to say. 
Now, the reason for this, as has been noted 
in another chapter, is that the artist puts him- 
self into his art; he makes us see his subject 
through his own eyes. We feel terror when 
we see a lion about to spring; and even a pho- 
tograph may remind us of the reality and so 
recall that terror; but in the springing lion 
of a great sculptor we feel also the artist's 
terror, something that he puts into his work 
and that his work transmits to us. The only 
way in which one artist can work thus on our 
feelings while another cannot, is by his way of 
doing what he does. We are terrified not be- 
cause we see something that the artist intended 
to represent a lion, but because he put some- 
thing terrific into the representation. This 
is all true of literary art as it is of other kinds. 
Why is there something terrifying about cer- 



90 Earmarks of Literature 

tain stories by Poe — The Pit and the Pen- 
dulum or The Black Cat? We may think 
that it is what Poe is telling about that terri- 
fies us, but this is merely the vehicle of his 
art. An artist who desires to inspire terror 
naturally selects a subject that is capable of 
being treated so as to bring about this re- 
sult; but whether it really does inspire terror 
or not depends on how he treats it. An in- 
ferior writer might select precisely the same 
subjects and incidents and only make his read- 
ers laugh. 

Another thing is true of literature as a form 
of art — it does not have to represent nature 
exactly. Written speech that professes to de- 
scribe nature must do so, of course, but this 
is usually science or travel and not generally 
pure literature, though it may be. A literary 
masterpiece may be entirely fanciful ; its ob- 
ject may be to inspire a feeling of vague 
beauty or even of mere uneasy suspicion or 
terror, as of objects seen through a mist. Thus 
the criticism "it is not true to nature" may 
be quite beside the point. Even where the 



Literature as a Form of Art 91 

writer's aim is to give an impression of reality 
he may often best do this by departing from 
literal description. He may give it by dwell- 
ing on some features to the exclusion of others ; 
by slightly exaggerating here and toning down 
there. 

No two persons get the same impression 
from looking at the same thing or from wit- 
nessing the same series of incidents. When 
a faithful witness describes a scene or an in- 
cident he lets his public know exactly how 
it seemed to him. Other witnesses will not 
agree and will frequently accuse him of ro- 
mancing. A writer who desires to be con- 
sidered realistic will set down everything that 
the various witnesses would be apt to agree 
on and omit everything that would be affected 
by what scientific men call "the personal 
equation." Then everyone will agree that the 
description is wonderfully true to life. But 
there are some artists and some writers who 
have the power not only to describe things 
as they see them but to make their public see 
them in the same way. The public will then 



92 Earmarks of Literature 

say, "Why, how true that is! how obvious! 
and yet I never thought of it before!" And 
others have the power to choose some unnat- 
ural point of view not really their own, and 
force it upon their readers. This is the kind 
of realism that describes a blue elephant with 
a yellow tail — as someone has said — " and 
makes you believe it." 

A critic of Turner, the English artist, is 
said to have remarked of one of the paint- 
er's sunsets that he had never seen such tints 
in the sky. " Probably not," rejoined Turner, 
" but don't you wish you could? " Turner was 
a great artist, but he would have been greater 
if he had been able to make his critic think 
that the sunset colors were normal and usual, 
even if they were not so. 



CHAPTER XI 

The Appreciation of Literature 

IT HAS been said that the effect of all 
art, and of literature as an art. depends 
on the way in which the artist has done his 
work — on his technic or his style. This is 
a very different thing from saying that one 
must understand just how the effect is pro- 
duced before one can appreciate it. Rather 
is it true that we appreciate more fully when 
we do not know. It is indeed interesting to 
know just where the mechanism is and how 
the artist operates it, but the effect of such 
knowledge is something apart from the ef- 
fect of the work of art that results from the 
artist's skill. 

It is interesting to be able to tell, by looking 
at a picture, what pigments the artist used, 
how he handled his brush and what were his 
views and abilities in drawing, perspective, 
and the distribution of light and shade. But 

93 



94 Earmarks of Literature 

none of these things are necessary to the im- 
pression that the painting, as a work of art, 
is intended to make on the beholder. 

Similarly, it is interesting to know that the 
poet has made skilful use of quantity and 
alliteration, that the dramatist has used cer- 
tain tricks to work up the situation that seems 
to us so naturally brought about, and so on. 
The student must investigate and know these 
things; the creator of a work of art or of 
literature must understand all the methods 
that can be successfully used to bring about 
the effects that he desires to create; but it by 
no means aids these effects to lay bare the 
methods to him upon whom they are to be 
produced. 

This may comfort some of the lovers of art 
or literature who feel hopelessly in the dark 
when artistic or literary friends talk glibly 
in professional jargon on technical details. 
These are highly interesting for those who 
care to go into them, so long as the skilful 
manipulation of some method is not lauded 
irrespective of the result that is attained. A 



The Appreciation of Literature 95 

student of surgery is interested and enthusi- 
astic when he sees a surgical expert perform 
some rare operation with consummate skill. It 
may matter little to him if, after all, the opera- 
tion has been unable to save the man's life. 
But to the man himself, life and death are the 
only things that matter. 

It is to be feared that many of us have been 
taught methods, when what we need is the 
ability to appreciate results — to tell the good 
from the bad, the noble from the mean, in lit- 
erature, art, or music. This can be done only 
by example. One cannot become a good man 
by studying ethics — by finding out someone's 
theory about the difference between good and 
evil. One must be brought up by and with 
good persons, in an atmosphere of goodness. 
Good literature, likewise, cannot be appre- 
ciated by analysis. We have analyzed, in 
this book, some of its phases, but no reader 
need think that this process will help him to 
appreciate or love it, although it may aid him 
to recognize it. 

Wagner freely employed in his music the 



96 Earmarks of Literature 

so-called leit-motif, or leading motive, a 
musical phrase which he connected in the 
minds of his hearers with some character, in- 
cident, idea, or emotion. He thus made use 
of the principle of association so familiar to 
students of psychology, which is especially 
strong with musical sounds. If one hears for 
the first time a striking melodic phrase when 
gazing at a beautiful scene, the repetition of 
that phrase at any time will act forcibly to 
bring the scene again impressively before the 
"mind's eye." 

So, when we have once seen a Wagnerian 
hero enter to a peculiar and recognizable 
strain, we shall think of him when we hear it 
again, and the composer may thus control our 
thoughts and emotions to a certain extent. In 
order that this effect may be produced it is 
not at all necessary that the hearer should 
consciously recognize the "motive," or even 
that he should know that there exists such a 
method of playing upon his feelings. Yet it 
is the commonest thing to see persons commit- 
ting these motives to memory and delightedly 



The Appreciation of Literature 97 

calling them by name when they occur in the 
music. 

The real effect of these motives is like that 
of a sight of the stars and stripes on a patri- 
otic soul. As he sees his country's flag his 
pulses leap. He does not say " Ah! a piece 
of cloth with stars and stripes on it! Such a 
piece of cloth constitutes the flag of the United 
States. It is now in order for me to feel pa- 
triotic!" 

No, a man can never argue himself into 
an appreciation of art or literature, nor can 
he attain it by learning the tricks of the art- 
ist's trade. 

We have seen above that no work of lit- 
erature can be good unless it is grammatical 
Will our appreciation of it be increased by 
a grammatical analysis? Ask those miserable 
creatures who have been forced to "parse" 
Paradise Lost what they think of Milton's 
masterpiece! Ask countless students of Latin 
and Greek whether their grammatical analy- 
sis of the Iliad and the Aeneid conduced to 
literary appreciation of those epics! 



98 Earmarks of Literature 

It is much to be regretted that the ana- 
lytical knowledge of construction and its 
methods, which is necessary for a constructive 
artist, should be so widely deemed necessary 
for the art lover to whom the art is to deliver 
its message. This belief and whatever has 
been done to act upon it, have killed the love 
and appreciation of art, music, and literature 
in thousands of souls where, perhaps, it had 
begun to bud. Anglo-Saxons are not natur- 
ally appreciative of what is good and great 
in art. So much the more should they be led 
to see it — not taught to butcher art and peer 
into its dismembered body, like the Roman 
soothsayers, in the vain hope of finding there 
what was never meant to be revealed in this 
way. 



CHAPTER XII 

The Preservation of Literature 

UNTIL within a very few years there has 
been no way of preserving spoken lan- 
guage except by remembering it. Informa- 
tion stored in this way must be handed down 
from father to son. Tradition, as this method 
of preservation is called, may or may not be 
accurate, and there is no way of testing its 
accuracy. Spoken language may now be re- 
corded and reproduced by the phonograph, 
and where the sound is the thing to be pre- 
served, rather than the sense, there is no other 
way that approaches it in accuracy. For in- 
stance, it gives us a means of preserving and 
reproducing pronunciation; and great muse- 
ums are availing themselves of this to record 
the way in which languages and dialects are 
spoken by all classes of people and in all parts 
of the world. 

But for long centuries no accurate method 

99 



100 Earmarks of Literature 

of preserving spoken language was known. It 
became necessary to appeal to another sense- 
organ than the ear, and the eye was chosen. 
Written speech appeals almost entirely to the 
eye; not entirely, for when the sense of sight 
is wanting it has been necessary to put the rec- 
ord into such shape that it can be read by 
touch. The result is the various raised al- 
phabets for the blind. Any sense may be 
used to receive ideas. A telegraphic message 
has been read by wire-tappers, by using the 
sense of taste, placing one end of the cut wire 
above the tongue and the other below it; but 
no record of such a use is possible. For a 
so-called permanent record, one that may be 
seen has always been chosen. The advan- 
tage that such a record has over tradition is 
not so much that it is really permanent, as that 
it is unchanging as long as it lasts, and can 
then be accurately transferred. Tradition 
suffers all sorts of change not only in its place 
of storage — the memory — but also in its 
transfer from one memory to another. 

No record is really permanent without 



The Preservation of Literature 101 

transfer. Records cut in stone or cast in metal 
have disappeared, not so rapidly, but quite 
as effectually, as those scribed in wax. Per- 
haps the most nearly permanent are those 
stamped on clay cylinders and afterward 
baked, after the manner of the ancient Baby- 
lonians, and even these are not proof against 
breakage. The only way to keep a record 
beyond danger of loss is to duplicate it widely 
and make sure that it is renewed frequently. 
This is the plan that we have adopted since 
the invention of printing, and it is working 
well, especially in the case of pure literature 
— the subject of this book. For pure litera- 
ture, as we have seen, is an art, and appeals 
to the feelings; it is the object of emotions, 
such as love, admiration, or wonder; it is 
fitted for companionship. So long as it in- 
spires feelings like these, the world will not 
let it die. Hence the works of a writer like 
Shakespeare are preserved, not so much be- 
cause someone, realizing that they contain 
matter worth keeping, sees that new editions 
are constantly issued; but because so many 



102 Earmarks of Literature 

readers admire them that they are reissued 
automatically to satisfy a commercial demand. 

It is somewhat different with records that 
are not a part of pure literature — with the 
vital statistics of towns, for instance. These 
are put into type and are reissued when nec- 
essary, not because anyone loves them, but be- 
cause governments, or societies, or scholars, 
know their value and take measures for their 
preservation. 

In our complete realization of the fact that 
a permanent record may be assured only by 
transfer, we have become more and more 
careless about using durable material, until 
we are overdoing the matter. Transfer will al- 
ways be necessary at some time, and it may be 
foolish to use awkward materials or difficult 
and costly processes merely to put it off for a 
century; but to require it at short intervals is 
surely quite as wasteful. No one would think 
of printing the works of Shakespeare with ink 
that would completely fade away at the end 
of a year; yet we are using paper for most 
of our books that will crumble into dust in 



The Preservation of Literature 103 

a few years. And we are using this kind of 
paper chiefly, not for the things that we are 
morally sure must and will be reprinted, no 
matter how soon they wear out, because mil- 
lions of readers love them, but for things that 
are not at all likely to be reprinted and will 
probably be a total loss when they do crumble 
away. Such are our periodicals, particularly 
our daily newspapers. Probably there never 
was such an amazing instance of the creation 
with great labor of a useful record with ab- 
solute disregard of its preservation — even 
with contemptuous disbelief in its value — by 
the very persons who have framed it. 

Librarians, historians, and scholars gener- 
ally, do not regard the newspapers in this way. 
In some state libraries, every newspaper in 
the state, no matter how small and insignifi- 
cant, is carefully preserved. Thousands of 
huge, bulky volumes are thus accumulated 
annually, at great expense — all to be lost 
eventually, because the poor paper on which 
they are printed will crumble to dust. It is 
not necessary, of course, to add to the expense 



104 Earmarks of Literature 

of printing by using good paper for the whole 
edition. Most of the papers are glanced at 
or read hurriedly and then thrown away. 
Only the copies that are to be preserved, 
amounting to a very few each day, need be 
printed on strong, durable paper. 

An effort has recently been made by a com- 
mittee of the American Library Association 
to induce at least a few of the more important 
American newspapers to do this, but only one 
paper agreed, and after a year's trial, that one 
has abandoned its strong-paper edition on the 
ground of expense. Our papers are thus 
perfectly willing that the material gathered at 
great labor and expense for the information of 
the public today should be absolutely lost to- 
morrow. 

Our present method of preserving written 
language by printing with ink on paper and 
then binding the paper into volumes, involves 
some care in the preservation of these volumes 
— it means buildings to shelter them and per- 
sons to care for them. The library is thus a 
necessary factor in our preservation of litera- 



The Preservation of Literature 105 

ture. But we should not forget that the most 
important factor in this preservation, after 
all, is not to care for the paper and leather 
of the books, but to see that they have readers 
who will love them and insist on their per- 
petuation. If through some strange accident 
only one set of Shakespeare's works should 
remain to us, the very worst way of trying 
to prevent loss of his name and fame, would 
be to lock that set up in a vault, guard it jeal- 
ously, and permit no one to handle it. Sooner 
or later its paper and leather would decay, 
and by that time a generation would have 
arisen that knew not Shakespeare. No one 
would care what became of the words of 
genius in those forgotten volumes, and they 
would perish with the rotting paper on which 
they were printed. 

The way to keep Shakespeare would be to 
let as many readers as possible see and read 
the volumes, so as to create a demand for 
duplicates. The unique set might fall apart 
years earlier, but it would leave many others 
behind it. 



106 Earmarks of Literature 

All this is appreciated by the modern li- 
brarian. He sees to it that his books, so far 
as they are really books and not mere curi- 
osities, are seen and read as widely as may 
be possible. When he finds that he wears 
out thousands of volumes in a year, he is 
glad, so far as this wear is caused by legitimate 
use ; for he knows that such use means a love 
of books, and that such a love, widely diffused, 
is the best possible guaranty of the continued 
preservation of what is best in the world's 
literature. 



CHAPTER XIII 

The Ownership of Literature 

MOST of us do not realize that art is an 
affair of our every-day lives. It is 
commonly regarded as something difficult and 
technical, like higher mathematics, to be 
shown in great museums and talked about by 
learned people. Few persons think of it as 
having anything to do with the clothes they 
wear or their furniture, or the utensils of 
their dining-rooms and kitchens. Yet if we 
love beautiful things, we shall desire to be 
surrounded with them and to use them. There 
is a widespread idea that none but the rich 
can afford to be artistic; but the fact is that 
those who live most simply are most often sur- 
rounded with tasteful and beautiful objects. 
The same is even more true of the literary 
art. It is easier to live among the beautiful 
and noble and tasteful in books, than it is in 
furniture or pottery. With the latter we are 

107 



108 Earmarks of Literature 

limited to what is in the markets accessible 
to us; and those markets often contain only 
ugly things. This is never the case with lit- 
erature. The noblest, the loveliest, and the 
best in books are apt to be the cheapest. On 
the standards of tried and accepted worth, the 
copyrights have expired. Their cost is but the 
expense of reproduction, and they may be had 
in readable form for a trifle. Anyone, there- 
fore, who knows the earmarks of literature; 
who is able to select what is good and has the 
taste to appreciate and love it, may have it 
in his own house, as his personal possession. 
We saw in the last chapter how important 
a part the library is playing in the preserva- 
tion of literature, not so much by shutting up 
books jealously, as minerals are shut up in a 
museum, as by distributing them widely, so 
that as many readers as possible may know and 
love them and become an active force tending 
to their continued renewal. It is thus part 
of the library's work to make book-lovers, and 
this means that it is part of its business to 
foster book-ownership. Modern libraries are 



The Ownership of Literature 109 

becoming more and more the expert advisers 
of those who want to own books. Modern 
bookstores of the best class are performing 
service of very much the same kind. It is not 
to the bookseller's advantage that he should 
force upon an unwilling reader something 
that will breed dislike instead of love. He 
should strive, and does strive, if he is a good 
bookseller, so to advise and direct purchasers 
that they will come to love books; for such 
a love means that he has established a perma- 
nent market. The would-be purchaser has 
always accessible to him the collections in the 
public libraries and in the large bookstores, 
so that he can browse freely, taste a little here 
and there, and select for purchase what he 
feels will satisfy his demands for literary 
companionship. 

The way to increase one's appreciation and 
love for what is best in an art is to saturate 
oneself with it. The way to understand music 
is to hear much of it; the way to understand 
painting or sculpture is to see much of it. So 
the way to understand and appreciate the 



110 Earmarks of Literature 

good and great in literature is to read much, 
not forcing oneself to wade through some- 
thing distasteful, but lingering over that 
which appeals to what is best in us. 

It should not be forgotten that we are 
speaking here only of literature in its nar- 
rowest and highest sense. If the reader is 
using a book for the information that it con- 
tains he may properly compel himself to read 
it, and such a task may be the very best thing 
for him. He does not love the book; he 
simply finds it necessary and profitable to 
acquire its contents. The feeling of friend- 
ship and affection that one has for a book that 
is part of the literature of inspiration is quite 
a different thing from this. Both may and do 
lead logically to book-ownership. It is neces- 
sary that we should have at hand dictionaries 
and cyclopedias and informational books of 
all sorts, though our feeling toward them is 
the sort of gratitude that we accord to the 
stranger who has told us the name of the street 
on which we are walking. 

The book-owner will buy for his own use 



The Ownership of Literature 111 

books of information, recreation, and inspira- 
tion. The first he will keep in his study, the 
second, perhaps, in the family living-room; 
the last in the room that is his very own, 
forming there a sort of inner circle of inti- 
mates. And in all these cases purchase should 
be a response to a personal need. A library 
made up of books of information that the 
owner has no occasion to use, books of recrea- 
tion that merely bore him, books of inspiration 
that he neither understands nor appreciates, 
and that meet with no response from his brain 
or his body — this, surely, is no library at all, 
but simply a miscellany, whose elements are 
unrelated both to each other and to the life 
and needs of the owner. In a recent study of 
the causes of lethargy among nations, a writer 
on sociology comes to the conclusion that one 
of these causes is the exaltation of processes 
above results. One generation wishes to reach 
a certain end and uses an appropriate method. 
The next generation no longer needs the result, 
but it keeps on with the process, through blind 
habit and a mistaken feeling that it is worth 



112 Earmarks of Literature 

something for itself alone. Such a feeling is 
fatal to progress and it has halted great 
nations like the Chinese in their tracks, so that 
they have merely marked time for centuries, 
while others who were savage when they had 
long been civilized, have emerged from bar- 
barism and far surpassed them in science and 
the arts. 

Now if there is one thing even more fatal 
than adherence to a process long after the 
need that gave rise to it has passed, it is the 
worship of an object associated in some way 
with that process. This is the mistake made 
by persons who reverence books merely be- 
cause they are books, and who think that they 
own libraries when the threads of human need 
and interest that should bind the volumes 
together, and to the owners, are totally lacking. 

A man wishes to be informed, or amused, 
or inspired; that is his need. It compels him 
to consult the records of what other minds 
have learned, or discovered, or elaborated; 
that is the process by which he tries to satisfy 
his need. The material object that we call a 



The Ownership of Literature 113 

book is merely associated with that process. 
There is not even any reason for the process 
itself unless the need exists, still less for its 
machinery. 

The buyers of books too frequently make 
this sad mistake of becoming the owners of 
devices to facilitate processes for reaching 
results to which they are quite indifferent. 
He would be a foolish man indeed who should 
spend his money for a churn when what he 
needed was not butter but the bread of life. 

And the most foolish thing of all is to own 
no books. An ill-assorted library is at least 
the vague expression of a literary need — 
illogical, perhaps, but capable of being 
amended and developed. The absence of a 
library is almost akin to the absence of a soul. 
Even the angels can do no more in such a case 
than to weep — and hope. 



CHAPTER XIV 

The Makers of Literature 

IN THE chapter on style it has been made 
clear that much of what is characteristic 
in a work of pure literature is derived from 
the author- — his personality, his abilities and 
training; the way in which he looks at things 
and his way of describing what he sees and 
expressing what he feels. The precise man- 
ner in which each of these things comes to af- 
fect the general result is plain in some cases; 
in others it is not so clear — it may be quite 
obscure sometimes. They are very much 
more important in pure literature than in 
works of any other kind. When a writer on 
arithmetic informs us that twice two is four, 
the factors in this statement are only three; 
the existence of the fact, the writer's knowl- 
edge of it, and his ability to convey it to us. 
When a poet describes a sunset, the fact that 
the sun is setting is not the all-important thing. 

114 



The Makers of Literature 115 

The important things are the effect of the 
sunset on the poet's mind, and the way in 
which he reproduces that effect in the mind 
of the reader. There are many who are poets 
in so far as they experience the effect, but they 
may be totally unable to convey it to others. 
Possibly, on the other hand, there are some 
who would be able to convey it to us if they 
felt it themselves, but they do not. Of a man 
of this sort the poet writes : 

A primrose by the river's brim, 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more. 

Now why is it that some literature has 
"vision" in it — makes us see clearly what 
we could not see before; gives us glimpses 
of beautiful or wonderful things ; inspires us 
to be good, noble, or useful, and to do good, 
noble, or useful things? Under what circum- 
stances is such literature produced? If we 
can find out, it would pay to go to enormous 
trouble and expense to reproduce and make 
these conditions permanent. "Let me write 



116 Earmarks of Literature 

the songs of a nation," says a writer, " and I 
care not who makes the laws." We may ex- 
pand this to say: the influence of the litera- 
ture of inspiration on a people is more far 
reaching than that of any kind of direct legis- 
lation or training. 

It has been assumed by some that if compe- 
tent persons were only removed from the 
pressure of daily labor, they would be free 
to occupy their time with creative work in 
literature. It is partly for this reason that 
authors are pensioned in some European 
countries. On the other hand it has been 
held that work done for pay is never of the 
best quality. If a man has in him some of 
this vision — this inspiration, it will struggle 
out, they say, no matter what the obstacles 
may be. Others have very strong ideas on 
the influence of environment; writers pro- 
duce great literature, they assert, in appropri- 
ate surroundings ; they sometimes need stimu- 
lation — great sights, the stirring of ambition 
or love; even drugs, like alcohol, caffein, or 
nicotine. It has even been asserted that 



The Makers of Literature 117 

genius, whether in literature or other fields, 
is due to disease — either directly or by the 
stimulation afforded by pain or other abnor- 
mal conditions. Probably these persons " all 
are right and all are wrong." The fact is 
that what we call genius is the product of 
many factors — of some that we understand; 
of others, doubtless, that are yet hidden from 
us. In some cases it may result from heredity, 
in others from environment, in others still 
from years of plodding work. Sometimes it 
may come from an exceptional opportunity, 
sometimes it is brought out by some stimulus, 
ambition, love, the desire for wealth, or even 
by bodily pain or incipient dementia. In 
some cases there seems to be nothing on earth 
that will account for it. 

Under these circumstances, we see that a 
great literary masterpiece may arise under the 
most varied circumstances. It may bud and 
blossom in the least expected place; it may 
be the product of years of labor; it may be 
done for pay, or it may be put forth in the 
pure joy of creative accomplishment. There 



118 Earmarks of Literature 

are various ways in which we may raise the 
average level of accomplishment in any field 
or in all fields, but no way in which we may 
produce a genius at will. 

One thing, however, may surely be done. 
Genius may arise spontaneously; or, what is 
the same thing, it may be produced under 
conditions that are yet obscure to us. But 
once produced, it may be given an opportu- 
nity for expression, or it may be smothered 
or allowed to " blush unseen and waste its 
fragrance on the desert air." This latter has 
too often been the case. Many great scien- 
tists, inventors, poets, and artists are not dis- 
covered until after they are dead. Earlier 
discovery and recognition might not have im- 
proved their output; it might have spoiled 
some of them, but at least it would have been 
an act of justice. 

Conditions at present are more favorable 
than ever before to the early recognition and 
discovery of genius, because they are more 
favorable to the wide dissemination of all 
artistic products and to the training of the 



The Makers of Literature 119 

public to appreciate them. These conditions 
favor also the dissemination of all sorts of 
inferior products, as a fertile soil favors the 
growth of weeds as well as plants. Our pres- 
ent methods are like those of the old-fash- 
ioned cultivator: we let weeds and plants 
both spring up and then uproot the former. 
A better method is coming to be recognized 
— the preparation of the soil by sterilization 
so that the weeds will not spring up at all. 
If we could only so deal, by education and 
training, with the minds of the people, that 
the mental product should never fall below a 
standard grade, we should be doing the same 
thing in the field of art and literature. Of 
course we shall never succeed altogether, but 
this is the goal at which educators should aim. 
Schools and colleges, and libraries, and study 
clubs, and civic and social organizations of 
all kinds, are continually working toward this 
end. We can scarcely doubt that they will 
do something at least to improve the makers 
of literature and to raise the standard of their 
output. 



CHAPTER XV 

Some Formalities of Written Speech 

QOME of the things that differentiate 
^ spoken from written speech are consid- 
ered in a previous chapter. In addition there 
are certain formal or symbolical elements be- 
longing to written speech, that can, by their 
very nature, have no part in spoken language. 
Foremost among these are capitalization and 
punctuation. We may first consider the ques- 
tion: Since it is impossible to capitalize and 
punctuate spoken language, of what use are 
capitals and points in written speech? Do 
we not understand clearly what a good 
speaker is saying to us? If so, why add to 
the complexities of writing in an endeavor 
to make it clearer still? Are not these addi- 
tions purely arbitrary, and should we not gain 
by omitting them? To a large extent this 
question is undoubtedly justified, and in so far 
as capitalization and punctuation are arbi- 
120 



Formalities of Written Speech 121 

trary it might be an improvement to disregard 
them. They are in fact being disregarded 
more today than formerly and more in the 
United States than in England. Still, it is 
probable that we shall always retain them or 
their equivalents to some extent in written 
speech. In the first place, it may be noted 
that elements making for clearness in spoken 
language are necessarily absent in the writ- 
ten form, so that it is necessary to supply their 
place. Intonation, inflection, and pauses play 
a large part in spoken language. In ordinary 
speech we do not find it necessary to indicate 
in any way the end of one word and the be- 
ginning of the next; in other words, we do 
not speak our words separately, except to a 
child or a foreigner. Intonation and accent 
make this necessary. In older forms of al- 
phabetical written language the same thing 
was done, and in some old inscriptions, for in- 
stance, there is no separation of the words, 
making reading a slow and difficult matter. 
Later it was found indispensable to make such 
separation, which was done first by punctua- 



122 Earmarks of Literature 

tion and afterward by leaving a space between 
each word and the next. Something like the 
same reason is valid in all punctuation. It 
is not true, as used to be taught, that each 
point corresponds to a pause. The points 
are to bring out the grammatical relations of 
the sentence, which in spoken language would 
be brought out not only by pauses, but also by 
stress, intonation, and inflection. When a 
question is asked, for instance, a speaker 
makes it clear by an upward turn of his voice 
at the end. In writing, we replace this by an 
interrogation point. It is a fact, however, 
that we generally apprehend these gram- 
matical relations more easily when the punc- 
tuation is not too close. This is partly due to 
the fact that we have no point of lower grade 
than the comma, and when many commas are 
used we have no means of telling which ones 
correspond in marking the beginning and end 
of clauses. Hence the tendency, as noted 
above, is to be sparing with points. In other 
words, we are bearing in mind that the point 
is simply to clear up the writer's meaning, 



Formalities of Written Speech 123 

in places where the means used for this pur- 
pose in spoken language are lacking. Where 
there is no such necessity — where the ob- 
scurity could be avoided by a rearrangement 
of words, or where everything is perfectly 
clear as it stands, no point need be used, no 
matter what "rule" some writer may have 
evolved on the subject. 

A mark that is practically one of punctua- 
tion is the hyphen. In studying its use we 
meet the whole question of whether two 
words, used together, should be written sepa- 
rately, or as a solid word, or with a hyphen 
between them. Evidently no such distinctions 
obtain in oral speech. Small volumes have 
been written on the subject, laying down ar- 
bitrary rules and condemning departures 
therefrom as incorrect. So far as these rules 
conduce to clearness they are well made, but 
if we regard the hyphen as a mark of punctu- 
ation, we shall conclude, and conclude rightly, 
that it may be used anywhere for the improve- 
ment of clearness, and omitted anywhere 
when its use would not clear up an obscurity. 



124 Earmarks of Literature 

Lack of appreciation of these principles leads 
to an occasional obscurity. For instance, the 
title Vice President is always written as two 
words. But when we use the prefix ex- with 
it, to denote a former vice president, what 
shall we do? Sticklers for form write ex-vice 
president, connecting the prefix closely with 
the first word and not at all with the second. 
If we could use algebraic symbols we could 
write "ex- (vice president) ," using the paren- 
thesis to denote that the prefix applies to all 
within. This, of course, is impracticable. 
What we can do, however, is either to write 
the title as one word here, or to hyphenate it, 
making either "ex-vicepresident" or "ex- 
vice-president." This breaks rules and is in- 
consistent, but makes for clearness, which is 
the object, after all, that the rules were meant 
to attain. 

Sometimes punctuation supplies a need that 
is not filled in spoken language. For in- 
stance, marks of quotation are obviously use- 
ful, and we can supply their place in reading 
or speaking only by using some awkward 



Formalities of Written Speech 125 

phrase, such as " beginning of quotation," 
"the quotation ends here," or the like. 

In capitalization, we have a much more ar- 
bitrary formality of written speech, having ab- 
solutely nothing in spoken language to corre- 
spond with it. Some of the purposes for 
which it was once used have been abandoned, 
at least in English. It was once the custom 
to begin all nouns with a capital, and it is still 
so in German, but we have given this up. 
Library cataloguers have given up most of the 
capitals. We might give up the use of capi- 
tals altogether without sacrificing the clear- 
ness and intelligibility of written speech. It 
would " look queer," but that means nothing 
more than that it would be a change. Modern 
German would look very odd to its readers 
if the nouns were not all capitalized. Cap- 
italization as we employ it is a pure formality, 
a relic of medievalism. The only reason for 
retaining it is that it is a familiar feature of 
written language, and it is very doubtful 
whether this should have weight against the 
effort and time necessary to learn and retain 



126 Earmarks of Literature 

the purely arbitrary rules for its use. We 
are dropping useless punctuation and we have 
already dropped much capitalization. Prob- 
ably the rest could be spared also. 

Another formality is the use of special type 
in the body of the word, such as italics, cap- 
itals, or small capitals. This usually repre- 
sents some peculiarity of stress or tone in 
spoken language. Italics, for instance, often 
denote emphasis, although a reference to the 
rules for their use will show that they may 
also serve other purposes, in cases where they 
might as well be dropped. It is difficult to 
see why the name of a newspaper or of a 
steamer should be italicized. No special 
stress or intonation is used in pronouncing 
either and no confusion could arise, in a prop- 
erly constructed sentence, from printing them 
in Roman type. Italics or capitals are some- 
times used with humorous effect. Thackeray 
employs them in this way. Howells makes 
good use of italics to bring out unusual or ab- 
normal stress in dialectal speech; so does 
Mark Twain. We could not altogether dis- 



Formalities of Written Speech 127 

pense with them ; but we could cut down their 
use considerably, and we are doing so. 

A further consideration of this subject 
brings us again to that of so-called spelling 
" reform." Is it not true that a silent letter, 
for instance, has the same status as a useless 
capital or mark of punctuation; and may it 
not be omitted, since there is now nothing to 
correspond to it in the spoken tongue? 

This is doubtless the view of those who ad- 
vocate changes in our spelling, but it is not 
that of the present writer. To him it seems 
that while capitalization and punctuation are 
not integral parts of the language, being 
merely formalities, handmaidens of speech, 
whose services may be dispensed with when 
they are no longer needed, symbols that are 
part of the word itself, even if corresponding 
sounds have been dropped from speech, stand 
on a different footing, as integral parts of the 
written language. This, of course, is to re- 
gard the written tongue as having a separate 
status — as being something other than merely 
a way of recording spoken language. 



CHAPTER XVI 

The Context in Literature 

WE CANNOT study literature long 
without seeing that it cannot be dis- 
membered without injury. An article, a 
poem, even a book, must be read as a whole 
if we are to get at its meaning and if we are to 
receive its full effect as literature. A para- 
graph or a sentence, separated from its sur- 
roundings, is much like an arm or a finger 
broken from a statue. It may be beautiful 
and may convey an idea, but it gives no idea 
of the whole. 

Nothing is more common than to quote ex- 
tracts from some great work. If these serve 
to whet the reader's curiosity so that he goes 
at once to see the gem in its real setting, they 
do no harm; but often they simply give a 
wrong idea of the work that they profess to 
illustrate. 

The point of a jest is often lost or altered 

128 



The Context in Literature 129 

by removing it from its context. For instance, 
Sydney Smith, the great English humorist, is 
often quoted as saying of a certain man that 
he " spoke very disrespectfully of the equator." 
This always seemed to me to be a poor joke, 
or rather a hint at some joke that lay con- 
cealed. So in fact it is. The context brings 
it out. This is the real story : 

A certain bore had devised a method of 
map-drawing with which he bothered all his 
friends. Occasionally they rebelled. Confid- 
ing in Sydney Smith, the map-drawer was 
telling of a recent rebuff. " And when I was 
explaining about my parallels of latitude, 
what do you suppose he said? He said 
'Damn the parallels of latitude!'" 

" Oh, that's nothing at all," quickly replied 
Smith. " Do you know, I've even heard him 
speak very disrespectfully of the equator!" 

The context, it will be seen, makes a sorry 
jest into a good one. 

Perhaps nothing illustrates how utterly an 
expressed idea, separated from its context, 
may change, than the present use of the word 



130 Earmarks of Literature 

" muck-raker." This word originated in a 
speech of Theodore Roosevelt's, in which he 
compared petty faultfinders to "The man 
with the muck-rake," in the Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress of Bunyan. His hearers, most of whom 
must have been unfamiliar with Bunyan, con- 
cluded that the man must have been out in the 
barnyard raking muck, or filth; and the 
whole use of the word has been affected by 
this idea. If anyone had taken a few minutes 
to look up the context, he would have found 
that the name " muck-rake" was used by Bun- 
yan simply as denoting a familiar form of 
rake, and that the first element of it meant 
nothing in particular. The man was not in 
a filthy barnyard, raking over the muck; he 
was in a room, gathering straws and other 
trivial and inconsequential things with the 
aid of his rake. Bunyan's point was that the 
man was overlooking essentials to pick out 
trivialities, and Roosevelt's use of the word 
is perfectly explicable on this theory. But 
no one takes the trouble to read the context, 
and for ninety-nine readers out of a hundred 



The Context in Literature 131 

"the man with the muck-rake" will hence- 
forth be a man who is raking muck. 

Often a widely-quoted passage in some 
poem or play fails to be perfectly understood 
or appreciated because the reader does not 
know something that precedes it. Take for 
instance such a celebrated speech as Portia's 
in The Merchant of Venice, beginning "The 
quality of mercy is not strained." This first 
line is often both misunderstood and under- 
estimated because the reader does not remem- 
ber its connection with the previous lines, to 
which it is an answer. Why should Portia, 
in a discourse on Mercy, begin by saying 
that it is not "strained?" Because, when she 
has just told Shylock that he must be merciful, 
he has asked : 

On what compulsion must I ? Tell me that ! 

This is an excuse for the discourse. Portia 
says in effect: "My poor fellow, you have 
misconceived the whole nature and operation 
of the quality called mercy, and I shall have 
to enlighten you. In the first place, mercy is 



132 Earmarks of Literature 

not something that comes with compulsion; 
it is not l strained' or forced — it droppeth 
gently as the dew." How the context here 
illumines the whole passage! 

In some cases popular misapprehension 
goes so far that it seems as if the public could 
not have read the work at all. Take, for in- 
stance, the persistence with which the island 
of Juan Fernandez is spoken of as " Robinson 
Crusoe's island." No reader of Robinson 
Crusoe is ignorant of the fact that his island 
was in the Atlantic, whereas Juan Fernandez 
is in the Pacific. The mistake arose from the 
fact that Defoe is said to have received a sug- 
gestion of his fictitious story from the true tale 
of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who lived alone 
for years on Juan Fernandez. Here the whole 
story of Robinson Crusoe is a corrective con- 
text to the incorrect popular idea. 

These things should warn a reader never 
to trust an extract that appears by itself. If 
he is inclined to disagree with its statements 
or to think it obscure or odd, let him read the 
context before he draws a conclusion. The 



The Context in Literature 133 

reading of extracts is not to be condemned, 
but the best way is to pick them out for one- 
self with the context always present, so that 
one may take in as much of it as may be nec- 
essary. Something is said of this in the next 
chapter. 



CHAPTER XVII 

The Sampling of Literature 

TT HAS been here stated, or implied, that 
■*■ in no kind of art, least of all in literature, 
will the mere knowing how a thing is done 
conduce to an appreciation of that thing or 
lend itself to the heightening of the effect that 
the thing was intended to produce. To en- 
joy literature one must read, and read again, 
and keep on reading. This does not mean 
that every masterpiece is fitted to appeal to 
every kind of man, though doubtless the 
greater it is the more universal will be its 
appeal. The only way in which one can 
ascertain and form one's taste is to read very 
freely by sample — to browse, as it is gen- 
erally called. It may be thought that this 
contradicts what has been said in another 
chapter on the value of the context, but there 
is in reality no contradiction. If the samples 
are removed from the context they may easily 

134 



The Sampling of Literature 135 

give a wrong impression, as we have seen. 
But in "browsing" they are not so separated. 
They are taken in connection with the con- 
text, and as much of it as may be necessary 
to complete understanding and appreciation 
will naturally be read with them. 

The advantages of "browsing" are two- 
fold — that gained in the process itself and 
that obtained through reading suggested or 
guided by it. 

In the first place, the browser gains a first- 
hand knowledge of authors, with the titles 
and general character of their works. One 
may discover that Omar Khayyam wrote a 
book called the Rubaiyat, by holding a copy 
in the hand for a second, without even open- 
ing it; a brief glance within will disclose that 
the work consists of poetry in four-line 
stanzas. Nor is such knowledge to be sneered 
at as superficial. It is all that we need to 
possess about scores of authors. One may 
never study higher mathematics, but it may 
be good for him to know that Lagrange was 
a French writer on analytical mechanics, that 



136 Earmarks of Literature 

Euclid was a Greek geometer and that Ham- 
ilton invented quaternions. All this and 
vastly more may be impressed on the mind by 
an hour in the mathematical alcove of a 
library of moderate size. Information of this 
kind is almost impossible to acquire from lists 
or from oral statement, whereas a moment's 
handling of a book in the concrete may fix it 
in the mind for good and all. This is on the 
supposition that not a word is read. But in a 
very brief perusal the reader may get an idea 
of the author's style, may absorb and appre- 
ciate some of his ideas, and may definitely 
place him in some sort of scheme of literature. 
The direct effect of what one may get by 
this sort of sampling is thus by no means neg- 
ligible. The indirect effect is even more 
important; for it may result in the definite 
formation of literary taste. Taste formed in 
this way is more characteristic of the indi- 
vidual, and on the whole more valuable, than 
that which is the result of too much guidance. 
Taste fixed by someone who tells the reader 
what he ought to like is not the reader's taste 



The Sampling of Literature 137 

at all but that of his informant. We have, on 
the whole, too little individual taste and too 
much tendency toward teaching that one must 
and should follow the taste of the majority. 
The student who likes what is trivial and 
below standard is by no means hopeless. As 
he grows in knowledge and judgment, as well 
as in breadth of reading, he may, and prob- 
ably will, change his mind about many books. 
If he frankly acknowledges his likes and dis- 
likes there is some hope for him. If he pre- 
tends to like that which is good simply be- 
cause he thinks he ought to like it, he is 
forming a habit of hypocrisy, which will be 
good neither for his mind nor his character. 
The reader who investigates the field of 
literature for himself and forms his own esti- 
mates will frequently find that he admires that 
which generations have admired before him. 
The sensation of pleasure and satisfaction that 
will result from such a discovery is vastly 
greater than that of liking a writer whom one 
has been previously told he ought to like. 
And if the reader admires one who has not 



138 Earmarks of Literature 

yet found his place in the literary pantheon, 
then there is equal satisfaction, but of a dif- 
ferent kind — that of original discovery. 



w 



CHAPTER XVIII 

The Sum of the Matter 

E HAVE seen that literature has ear- 
marks — that there are signs to identify 
it among the mass of trivial, unfit, ignoble, 
and ephemeral works with which it first sees 
the light and under which it is often buried. 
Those signs may be vague ; it may not be pos- 
sible for some to read them. He who does 
not know correct English from incorrect can 
not condemn the ungrammatical book; he 
who has not a sense of fitness will not be able 
to discard what is unfitting ; he whose feeling 
for rhyme or rhythm is deficient will never 
be a judge of poetry. And he whose pulses 
do not respond to what is noble and inspiring 
will never recognize nobility and inspiration 
when he meets them in literature. Some read- 
ers, doubtless, never can acquire these things. 
Others, unfortunately, have lacked opportu- 
nity. But the marks are there; it is right that 

139 



140 Earmarks of Literature 

we should realize this fact and not imagine 
that the difference between a great writer and 
a poor one depends wholly on some kind of 
critical appreciation that bears no tangible 
relation to their works. 

We have seen that the reader's own interest 
in a work of literature and love for it is an 
important element in his relationship to it, 
and that his lack of knowledge of its technical 
construction is no reason why its message 
should not reach him. We have seen that 
literature is a form of art, and that, as in 
other forms, such as sculpture, painting, or 
music, the artist's message is conveyed in it by 
the way in which he has been able to handle 
his subject, rather than by the content of that 
subject itself. 

We have seen that literature is preserved 
by love — by wide knowledge and apprecia- 
tion rather than by seclusion, and that a wide- 
spread love of good literature is vitally 
necessary if we are to hand down to our 
descendants what is best instead of something 
scarcely worth while. 



The Sum of the Matter 141 

In this dissemination and the popular 
education that accompanies it, the great col- 
lections of books in our public libraries play 
an important part, but no less important is 
the ownership of books by those who love 
them. He who has never loved a book has 
lost something from his life. He who has 
loved books, but has owned none, must have 
loved them little; for the book-lover who is 
content with his first reading can hardly be 
one to whom literature in its highest and best 
sense makes a moving appeal. The conclu- 
sion of the whole matter is this : Know books ; 
love books — and be their possessor. 



INDEX 



Academy, French, 19 

Accent, definition, 49 

Accent in poetry, 62 ; in prose, 
50 

Agglutinative stage of lan- 
guage, 77 

Alliteration, in poetry, 48, 52 

Alphabet, origin of, 71 ; vs. 
syllabary, 82 

Alphabets for the blind, 100; 
foreign, 76 

Analysis, misuse of, 97 

Appreciation of literature, 93 

Appropriateness of style, 32 

Arabic characters, 76, 82 ; lan- 
guage, 85 

Art, characteristics of, 44; lit- 
erature, a form of, 87 

Authors of literature, 114 

Auxiliaries, use of, 79 

Browsing, 134 

Capitalization, 120 

Character in style, 40 

Children's books, inappropri- 
ate, 35 

Chinese characters, 71, 76, 81 

Classical allusions in litera- 
ture, 28 

Classification of literature, 3 

Clearness and correctness dis- 
tinguished, 22 ; confusing 
attempts at, 30; of style, 21 

Context in literature, 128 



Drama, The, 53 
Dramas, "novelized," 55 

Eskimo language, 79 
Esperanto, 86 

Foreign words, use of, 27 
Formalities of literature, 120 
Forms, special, in literature, 

47 
French a literary tongue, 8 

Genius, causes of, 117 
German, capitalization in, 125 
Grammar, in style, 10 
Greek language, 79 

Headlines, style of, 48 
Hebrew characters, 76, 82 
Hiragana syllabary, 81 
Hyphen, The, 123 

Idiographs, 76 
Idioms, 17 

Ido, modified Esperanto, 86 
Indian languages, 77 
Infinitives, "split," 23 
Inflected languages, 78 
Irish "brogue," 74 
Italics, use of, 126 

James, Henry, style of, 29, 42 
Japanese characters, 76, 81 

Katakana syllabary, 81 

Language, growth of, 12; in- 



143 



144 



Index 



ternational, 85; laws of, 11; 
origin of, 70; three stages 
of, 76; written and spoken, 
70 

Leit-motif, in Wagner's op- 
eras, 96 

Letters, style of, 34 

Library and book-ownership, 
108; a factor in book-pres- 
ervation, 104 

Literature, meaning of the 
word, 1 

Meredith, George, style of, 42 
Meter, in poetry, 51, 62, 67 
"Methinks," use of, 17 
Muck-raker, origin of term, 

130 
Music, for verse, 37, 67 ; "pro- 
gram," 88 

Nature in art, 90 
Negative, the double, 14 
Newspapers, evanescence of, 

103 
Novels, dramatized, 55; form 

in, 57 

Obscurity, two kinds of, 21 
"Occasional" literature, 36 
Operas, librettos of, 68 
Oratory, 55 

Paper, poor quality of, 103 
Parodies, 43 

Pensions for authors, 116 
Phonograph records, 74, 99 
Poetry, 48; as literature, 5; 

reading aloud, 61 ; set to 

music, Z7> 67 



Portia, speech on mercy, 131 
Pronunciation, 73 ; records of, 

99 
Punctuation, 120 

Quantity, in poetry, 51, 64 

Reading poetry aloud, 61 
Records, permanence of, 101 
Rhymes for the eye, 61 
Rhythm in poetry, 62 
Robinson Crusoe's island, 132 
Roosevelt, Theodore, use of 

"muck-rake," 130 
Rules, status in language, 18 

Slang, 13 

Smith, Sydney, anecdote of, 

129 
Solemn diction, in English, 34 
Spelling reform, 75, 127 
Style, definition, 9 
"Style is the man," 40 
Subjects, in literature, 44 
Syllabaries, 81 
Syllabic stage of language, 77 

Technic, in art, 93 
Telegraphic style, 47 
Tradition, 100 
Translation of poetry, 68 
Transliteration, 84 
Turkish language, 78 

Unities, dramatic, 53 

Volapuk, 86 

Wagner's music-dramas, 52, 

68,95 
"You was," incorrectness of, 

15 



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